SLAVERY ILLUSTRATED 

IN ITS EFFECTS UPON 

WOMAN AND DOMESTIC SOCIETY 



By 
GEORGE BOURNE 



The Black Heritage Library Collection 



t 



HOOKS KOR l,IBK AKIKS PRESS 
FREEPORT. NEW YORK 

1972 



SLAVERY ILLUSTRATED 

IN ITS EFFECTS UPON 

WOMAN AND DOMESTIC SOCIETY 



By 

GEORGE BOURNE 



The Black Heritage Library Collection 



t 



BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS 

FREEPORT, NEW YORK 

1972 






First Published 1837 ^ 
Reprinted 1972 



Reprinted from a copy in the 
Fisk University Library Negro Collection 



Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data 

[Bourne, George] 1780-1845. ^ 

Slavery illustrated in its effects upon woman anl 
domestic society. 

(The Black heritage library collection) 

1. Slavery in the United States — Controversial 

literature — 1837. 2. Slavery in the United States 

— Condition of slaves. I. Title. II. Series. 

E4A9.B77/; 1972 301.44- '93 72-64-80 

ISBN 0-8369-9174.-5 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



1 8 MAR 1974 






SLAVERY ILLUSTRATED 



/ 



IN ITS 



EFFECTS UPON WOMAN 



DOMESTIC SOCIETY. 



" A generation, O how lofly aro their eyes ! — whose teeth are as swords, 
and their jaw teeth as kniven, to devour the pour from off the earth, and tho 
needy from among men!" — Agar. 

" They have given a boy for a harlot, and sold a girl for wine, that they 
might drink ! " — Joel. 

'• They sold tho righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes ; and 
turn aside the way of the meek. A man and hi» father will go in unto the 
same maid, to profane my holy name!" — Amos. 



BOSTON: 



PUBLISHED BY ISAAC KNAPP, 
25 Cornhill. 

1837. 



r 

. — 



Entered, according to an Act of Congress, in the year 1337, by 

ISAAC KNAPP, 
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts. 



Marden & Kimball, Printers, 
3 Sc'wul Street. 



THIS VOLUME 

IS 

^{fcctfonatclfl finscvibcU 

TO 

All the Members of 

WITH PBOFOUfCD SOLICITUDE 

Tliat those sisters in philanthropy may be stimulated to 

UNTIRING EXERTION IN BEHALF OF 

TWELVE HUNDRED THOUSAND 

Who ore now chained in 

THE AMERICAK 

HOUSE OF BONDAGE. 



Oh, lady, when a sister's cry is ringing on the air, 

When woman's pleading eye is raised in agonized despair, 

When woman's limbs are scourged and sold 'midst rude and brutal mirth, 

And nil affections liuliest ties arc trumpled to the earth, 

May fi'male hearts be si ill unstirred, and 'midst their wretched lot, 

The victims o( unmeasured wrongs, be carelessly forgot ; 

Or shall the prayer he poured for them, the tear be freely given. 

Until the chains that bind theui now, from every limb be riven; 

£. M. Chandler. 




By virtue of special contract, Shylock demanded a pound of 
flesh cut nearest to the heart. Those who sell mothers separately 
from their children, likewise claim a legal right to human flesh • 
and they too cut it nearest to the heart. L. M. Child. 



CONTENTS 



Notice. 6 

Chap. I. Introductory. 9 

" II. Marriage. 33 

" III. Condition of Female Slaves. • • - - 45 

" IV. Effects of Slavery upon Domestic Relationship. 70 

" V. Duty of the Slave-holder's Female Relatives. • 95 

" VI. Impurity of the Christian Churches. - - 107 

" VII. Duty of Northern Christian Women. - - 121 



NOTICE. 



rf we have whispered truth, 

fVhisper no longer ; 
Speak as the tempest doth, 

Sterner and stronger: 
Yet be the tones of truth 

Louder and firmer ; 
Startling tlie haughty South 

With the deep murmur. IVhilUer. 

Deeply has the conviction been rooted, during the last 
twenty-five years, that the condition of American colored 
women, and the collateral topics included in the seventh 
commandment, are the most important theme in the whole 
controversy upon slavery ; because it combines the ecclesias- 
tical questions with all the grand moral points. Yet this vol- 
ume probably would not at present have been promulged, had 
not the moral and religious warfare assumed a hideous char- 
acter, not less fearful than it is astounding. 

As loner as the sons of corruption pretended to justify or to 
palliate the enormities of slave-driving by the principles of 
carnal policy, or a temporising expediency, or worldly inter- 
est or any other of the pleas which plainly are branded with 
the' mark of Cain, they might be repelled with mild weapons ; 



VI NOTICE. 

and any anli-slavery man can discomfit hosts of the cham- 
pions for kidnappino^, although thoy are " like the grasshop- 
pers or the sand of the seashore for multitude." Ttiose 
motley " uncircumcised Philistines who defy the armies of 
the living God," have therefore changed their weapons ; and 
now, after the example of their master, " that old serpent 
called the Devil and Satan, who deceiveth the whole world," 
those " deceitful workers are transforming themselves into 
angels of light." 

It has therefore become indispensable Cot their overthrow, 
to verify the truth of Elihu's declaration, — "There is no 
darkness, nor shadow of death where the workers of iniquity 
may hide themselves." The apostolic declaration is appre- 
ciated in all its solemn and weighty import. " It is a shame 
even to speak of those things which are done of them in 
secret." But it is equally proper practically to exemplify 
Paul's admonition, — " Have no fellowship with the unfruit- 
ful works of darkness, but rather reprove." 

Now if any man-stealing ecclesiastical TertuUus is anxious 
to confute the principles or to disprove the facts in the ensu- 
ing pages, let him appoint a period for a meeting in Boston 
for that purpose ; or if the southern slave-drivers prefer to 
act by deputy, let them despatch one of their hireling editors 
who will promulge slander and falsehood to the full worth of 
the slave produce, which, having been filched from the colored 
citizen, they may send to Boston, or New-York, as a recom- 
pense for their outrageous work. 

During some time past, by individuals, and by ecclesiastical 
combinations, elaborate attempts have been made to array 
the Holy Scriptures on l)ehalf of the pro-slavery combatants. 
This has been done by false criticisms, by groundless assump- 
tions, by perverted truth, and by dishonest evasions of the 
cardinal topics in debate. American slavery is amays, in all 
its modifications, and from beginning to end, condemned by 



NOTICE. Vll 

divine revelation. Such a thing as an American slave was 
unknown to the Israelites and Jews ; and it is not less insult- 
ing to man than it is dishonoring to God, to send Christians 
of this nineteenth century after the day of Pentecost, back to 
the idolaters of ancient Greece and Rome to learn their duty 
as followers and disciples of Jesus, the Lord of all. But inas- 
much as this disgraceful course is pursued by Doctors and 
Professors of Theology, who wish to blind our eyes by per- 
suading us that a Bible-robbing, a man-stealing, a woman- 
selling, a chain-forging, a marriage-destroying, a slave-manu- 
facturing, and a man-slaying system, is " Bible doctrine that 
will stand ; " and that its perpetuation is indispensable to 
" preserve the integrity of the Union;" we give them an- 
other "bone to gnaw." 

Nothing but imperious necessity could overcome the objec* 
tions which may be made to the publication of some of the 
ensuing facts. But it must be remembered, that nothing is 
told in the following chapters, which is not substantially 
known to every man and woman, married or single, and to 
every boy and girl, at an early age, with comparatively few 
exceptions, throughout the slave-dealing territories. This 
book contains nothing which is not as familiar to tjje resi- 
dents on a slave plantation, as the corn and rice which they 
eat. The abolition of slavery in America is emphatically the 
duty and privilege of women. Northern female Christians 
must clearly " behold the great and wicked abominations 
that they do " in the slave plantations, before they will 
all combine, " with one heart and soul," to cast out the 
Legion of Devils which there dwell. Besides, it is requi- 
site to give the pro-slavery perverters of the right ways of 
the Lord an opportunity to terminate this controversy by de- 
ciding one vital point. I therefore publicly proffer to become 
a slave for life to any D. D. Doctor Divinilalis, or Doctor 
Diaboli, who will demonstrate that Abraham was a slave- 



Vlll NOTICE. 

holder, such as modern preachers are in the southern States ; 
and that the undeniably accurate delineation of slavery in this 
volume is "Bible doctrine that will stand" the test of gos- 
pel examination and the scrutiny of the judgment-seat of 
Christ ! 

Boston, August I, 1837. 



CHAPTER I. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



What! shall we guard our neighbor still, 

While woman shrieks beneath hiii rod, 
And while he tramples down at will, 

The inaage of our common God ! Wkittier. 

The ensuing concise delineation of American Slavery, 
in the effects which result from one sphere of its ope- 
ration, is not designed to demonstrate its abstract un- 
righteousness, as a theory for disputation ; or its op- 
pressions as totally subversive of all human freedom 
and conscientious rights. That slavery is equally un- 
scriptural and barbarous, and as unconstitutional as it 
is unjust, is a proposition which no argument and no 
evidence can render more certain and convincing to all 
men whoso rational faculties are in ordinary exercise. 
Slave-drivers and their abettors do not want illumina- 
tion ; but moral sensibility and Christian principles. 

The most common, and yet the most unholy of all 
the excuses which are alleged for the infatuated adhe- 
sron to the system of slavery in the United States, are 
these : — The early prejudices which the slaveholders 
imbibe ; and the habits of life to which they were ed- 
ucated, and to which they have been inured from in- 



10 INTRODUCTORV. 

fancy. What influence those things might have upon 
the formation of character among that part of mankind 
who, " having no hope, are without God in the world," 
it is irrelevant to discuss. Our inquiry adverts to 
American citizens alone, who have been born and 
educated in the United States since the ratification 
of our Federal Constitution. Their first lesson has 
been this — "All men are created equal, and are 
possessed of certain inalienable rights." Their boast 
and their shout, "Liberty!" Their denunciation of 
almost all other countries, that their inhabitants in dif- 
ferent degrees are fettered by tyrannical potentates. 
Their almost unceasing chorus — "We never will be 
slaves." 

These distinctive features are rendered more vivid 
by another consideration ; that all their mental and 
moral acquisitions have been obtained amid the splen- 
dors, and under the acknowledged supremacy and 
sanction of the gospel of Christ ; which inculcates 
reciprocal rectitude, and personal responsibility to Je- 
hovah, as the result of the divinely bestowed boon of 
civil and religious freedom. 

Notwithstanding, therefore, all those immunities, and 
all those proud exultations, and all the egotism which 
have emanated from the possession of these invalu- 
able enjoyments ; there is existing in this Republic a 
system of slavery, than which nothing more adverse to 
all human comfort and improvement can possibly be 
imagined — and than which, no ingenuity of wicked- 
ness can contrive a machinery more efficient to despoil 
man of all his loftiest privileges, to drive him into the 



INTRODUCTORY. 11 

most brutal degradation, and to insure for him the 
wrath of God. And it should be deeply impressed 
upon our minds, that all this machination of evil is im- 
pelled and prolonged by men whose every feeling, 
conviction, motive, and desire, with all their constant 
declarations, it ever most strenuously and directly 
contradicts. 

When we speak of prejudices of education or early 
habits of life, in common parlance, we never intend 
by it to convey the impression that departures from 
domestic purity and social equity are the result of an 
inveterate constitutional bias, similar to the animal in- 
stinctive loathings or attachments. Yet we are told 
that slavery may be excused, or rather that the slave- 
dealer and the slave-tortur-er are, in a great measure 
to be pardoned, and notwithstanding its inherent and 
incurable injustice and inhumanity, that the system it- 
self is extenuated, because the " broker in the trade 
of blood," has been brought up in the midst of its 
scenes, and he " knows no better," through early pre- 
possessions and habits. 

It is one of the grave charge.s against some of the 
pretended moral casuists of the European continent, 
that they taught that deadly doctrine — that men might 
be invincibly ignorant that violations of the divine com- 
mandments arc sins ; and therefore, that although they 
are profane, or cruel, or unclean, or mendacious, or 
fraudulent, or impious, or criminal in every degree, 
they are not worthy of punishment, because they were 
not acquainted with the moral law of God, and its 
authority and obligations, when the act was perpe- 



12 INTRODUCTORY. 

trated. That doctrine, although it directly subverts 
all morals and all religion, is the foundation upon which 
is erected that unhallowed castle where slave-holders 
attempt to intrench themselves against the evangelical 
artillery with which the Christian philanthropists are 
endeavoring to overthrow that stronghold of ungodli- 
ness and despotism. 

No melancholy facts in the annals of human deprav- 
ity are more direful than the prominent circumstances 
connected with American slavery. That slavery should 
be extenuated under the plea of education, juvenile 
habits, long associations, and widely influential exam- 
ple, is most disgraceful to our country, and especially 
when combined with our public extravagant professions 
of " Liberty and Equality! " But that slavery should 
have become fortified in the Christian church ; and 
sixty years after the American Declaration of Inde- 
pendence and the Bills of Rights ; and fifty years 
subsequent to the adoption of our national confed- 
erated constitution, that the ministers, officers, and 
members of the religious denominations should con- 
stitute the prominent and most inveterate actors and 
defenders of the vilest practical curse which ever des- 
olated mankind, is an anomaly so atrocious and heart- 
rending, that, were it not a visible, and oral, and tan- 
gible fact, its very enormity alone would utterly pre- 
clude any rational persons from crediting its exist- 
ence. 

That hardness of heart and astounding criminality 
hitherto have been assailed in vain. The incongruity 
of liberty and slavery ; the utter irreconcilableness of 



INTRODUCTORY. 13 

the reciprocal justice and philanthropy of the gospel 
with the perpetual frauds andbarbarity, without which 
American slavery cannot exist for one moment ; the 
indescribable wickedness of concealing under the 
garb, and of branding with the name of Christianity 
an incurable mass of impiety and irreligion ; and the 
hypocrisy of attempting to combine a profession of 
love to the gracious Redeemer, with fettering the 
bodies and destroying the souls of men — all have 
been illustrated, expatiated upon, and enforced until 
language has almost lost its influence, admonition its 
solemnity, warning its fearful menaces, and the last 
judgment its ineffable terrors. 

One subject yet remains to be faithfully disclosed 
and explained in its application. That is, the exhibi- 
tion of "Slavery, in its relation to Woman ; and in 
its effects upon Domestic Society." I am aware that 
the very mention of that theme will array a motley 
phalanx of all descriptions of sinners against the cause 
of truth, who will join the outcry of the slave-holders 
respecting "indelicacy," and "indecorum." But I am 
certain that there is no part of the dark and hidden 
iniquities of slavery which so powerfully demands a 
correct exposure as the condition and habits of the 
slave-holders in connection with the duties and prohi- 
bitions of the seventh commandment. There is a 
hypocritical and immoral fastidiousness prevalent re- 
specting the discussion of that part of the divine moral 
law which is not less unscriptural than it is pernicious. 
The sexual relation is of God's appointment. The 
emotions and sensibilities that are indissolubly com- 



14 INTRODUCTORY. 

bined with that consociation are of the purest and most 
refining character ; and had our first parents " held 
fast their integrity," they would have embodied no 
more indelicacy or impurity, than any other of the 
inseparable instincts of humanity. By the entrance of 
sin into the world, the craving of hunger has been the 
cause of gluttony ; the sensation of thirst has been 
the source of drunkenness ; and the purest attach- 
ment has been transformed into the grossest corrup- 
tion. 

There are two other facts conjoined with this absurd 
unwillingness to permit instruction and admonition re- 
specting the sexual associations, which are equally 
preposterous and pregnant with evil. Parents, for the 
sake of their children's health, impress them with the 
necessity of restraining their appetites from the im- 
moderate use of food, di'ink, and useless or pernicious 
luxuries ; but as they grow up, a passion or instinct 
equally strong, oftentimes more impetuous, when not 
under constant moral restriction, than either hunger 
or thirst, is allowed to develop its morbid impulses 
with no other counteraction than the dread of discov- 
ery after indulgence. The immorality, the constitu- 
tional injury, the irreparable pollutions, and the cost- 
liness of the ignoble course to which they become ha- 
bituated, with the other malign consequences in which 
the transgressors generally become involved, impress 
them not, until they have learned the direful lesson 
by that experience which may embitter all their future 
earthly pilgrimage. All of which, under the divine 
blessing, might have been saved, had the parents duly 



INTRODUCTORY. 15 

taught their children, and warned them, and placed 
them under proper regimen at that age when the play- 
ful unconsciousness of infancy assumes the character 
and energy of that passion which comprises not only 
the comfort, but also the existence of the human fam- 
ily. The other circumstance is still more alarming in 
its effects upon the public morals ; because it demon- 
strates that there is a profound and fearful apathy 
generally predominant upon this most important topic. 
All classes of the impure unite vociferously to con- 
demn the faithful exposure of the sins of uncleanness ; 
and a large majority of Christian teachers and disci- 
ples are either intimidated to silence, or from thought- 
lessness acquiesce in that sinful attempt to counteract 
every pungent delineation of those crimes which, more 
than any other, dissolve the bonds of society, eradi- 
cate the safeguards of domestic peace and enjoyment, 
and pollute the very fountains of human existence. 

I have known many persons who impute most of 
their terrestrial sorrows and characteristic wayward- 
ness, to that grand defect in their parents, when they 
attained the age of puberty. Well acquainted with the 
nature of their unavoidable associations, and the " evil 
communications corrupting good manners," to which 
their youth were almost constantly exposed ; and if 
they ever duly reflected, fully conscious of the dan- 
gers which encircled them, not one syllable ever 
escaped their Christian father and mother, to warn 
them against the " paths of the destroyers." I have 
known persons who, although they were renewed by 
divine grace, often most bitterly lament that unchris- 



16 INTRODUCTORY. 

tian squeamiskness which could permit their parents to 
allow them for four, five, or seven years at the most 
perilous age, to mingle with companions, listen to 
ensnarements, contract habits, and engage in scenes, 
of the unavoidable effects of which they must have 
been apprised — all without premonition of its guilt, 
warning of the consequences, advice to resist and tlee 
from the contamination, or one solitary instruction 
how effectually to repress the augmenting unhallowed 
fire. Myriads of youth now living, if they were can- 
didly to detail their own experience, would stale that 
this general portrait, with different features and modi- 
fications, is their own moral likeness. 

This melancholy development is of still deeper in- 
terest, when it is remembered that there exists at pres- 
ent a systematic process to corrupt the heart ; against 
the fascinations and artifices of which, nothing but the 
most lofty moral principles, enlivened by "pure reli- 
gion and undefiled," combined with the most sedulous 
guardianship over the consociations of youth, can pos- 
sibly shield them. Painful as is the alternative, yet 
parents at the proper season, of which they alone are 
competent judges, should impart to their children that 
partial acquaintance with the subject, in connection 
with their tenderest advice and affectionate prayers, 
which then might preserve them, if not from that dis- 
covered turpitude which results in disgrace, yet from 
those secret or concealed licentious indulgences, which 
attach a permanent influence to the moral character 
during the entire course of their mortal existence. 

When wc consider the principles and conduct of 



INTRODUCTORY. 17 

those who are most obstreperous in their revilings of 
the open combatants against sensual defilements, the 
mind is lost in amazement, both at their effrontery and 
their seared consciences. With some few exceptions, 
those persons may be classified as the promoters of 
the theatre, and other similar ungodly incentives to 
vice, with all the mixed multitudes, of the dissipated of 
every variety, from the finished profligate to the " re- 
spectable" ladies and gentlemen who attend those 
vestibules of hell, to behold scenes, at which they de- 
ceitfully profess to be shocked in any other situation, 
to exhibit themselves in a manner which they would 
consider grossly indecent in tiieir own parlors ; and 
to hear equivoques, and to participate in conversa- 
tions, which at any other season or in any other place, 
they would affect indignantly to resent. The fact is 
this ; no woman can retain her native feminine mod- 
esty, and visit modern theatres. A thoughtless and 
uninformed girl, under false pretexts, or impelled by 
curiosity, may be enticed once into that " cage of un- 
clean and hateful birds ;" but if she voluntarily enters 
a second time into that factory of Satan, she must 
make no more pretensions to innocence, even if she 
can to personal virtue. Now all the approvers of the 
licentious danseuses, and all their associates, with 
every person of depraved principles and disorderly 
life, whether their irregularity is avowed or disguised, 
constitute one solid ]>halanx, who revile with incessant 
contumely, the moralists that depict and censure their 
wickedness. They are supported by the political 
press, the inordinate devotion of the editors of which 



18 INTRODUCTORY. 

generally to the cause of infidelity and irreligion, is a 
melancholy "sign of the times." From one end of 
this republic to the other, in all tlie cities and populous 
towns, excluding a few rare and exemplary individuals, 
the whole editorial corps of the common newspapers 
form one grand confederacy, who may most graphi- 
cally be characterized in the words of David — " They 
walk in the counsel of the ungodly ; they stand in the 
way of sinners ; they sit in the seat of the scornful ;" 
and like the raging heathen, they are people " who 
imagine vain things, and take counsel together against 
the Lord." 

All those persons will doubtless effuse their wrath 
against the discussion and statements which this vol- 
ume contains. But no apology is offered for the argu- 
ment ; and all the ecclesiastical men-stealers from 
Marcus Hook in Pennsylvania to Cape Florida and 
New-Orleans, and round about by St. Louis, back to 
Wilmington, with all the hordes of slave-drivers and 
slave-traders, who roam within that wide domain, are 
challenged to disprove the facts. For nearly twenty- 
five years, it has been my unalterable conviction, and 
it is also the deliberate judgment of the few consistent 
citizens and Christian philanthropists who reside in the 
southern States, that all expectation of extirpating slav- 
ery is altogether visionary, as long as the profession 
of religion by one slave-holder or by one slave, upon 
any possible pretext is recognised as sincere and evan- 
gelical by the northern churches and by foreign Chris- 
tians. All efforts to excite that healthful feeling of 
moral principle and that aversion to slavery which are 



INTRODUCTORY. 19 

indispensable to the abolition of that monster in the 
United States, will be nugatory, as long as the women 
in the slave-holding districts submit to their present 
debasement. To which may be added, that slavery 
will not be abolished as long as perjured mcn-sleahrs 
are elected to fill public offices, either in the legisla- 
ture, the judiciary, or the executive department. 

Among the perplexing annals of" the nominal Chris- 
tian church, no one circumstance is more astonishing, 
when considered in all its bearings, than the mortify- 
ing truth, that the spirit of slavery, during more than 
half a century, should have been permitted to control 
the American churches ; and that by the deliberate 
adjudications of many of the large representative 
bodies of different denominations of Christians in the 
year 1836, that unacknowledged influence should have 
been developed and exalted to a similar supremacy 
with that which is recorded by the spirit of prophecy, 
of " the man of sin and son of perdition," to which, 
in different forms, he is twin brother in "all deceiv- 
ableness of unrighteousness" — for the demon of man- 
stealing "opposeth and exalteth himself above all that 
is called God ; so that he as God sitteth in the temple 
of God, showing himself that he is God." 

In various places in the southern States, the church 
in its consociate character, hold as disposable property 
a number of slaves. They are transferred, hired, and 
increased, like other merchantable articles, for the 
emolument of ''the church.^' "The hire of those 
laborers which is of them kept back by fraud," is paid 
to the preacher as his salary for not preaching " the 



20 INTRODUCTORY. 

gospel to the poor, and deliverance to the captives ;" 
and for not " publishing good tidings of peace and 
salvation." The Lord Jesus Christ declared that the 
tables of money-changers, and the baskets of them 
who sold doves alone, within the precincts of the an- 
cient "temple of God," actually transformed his 
" house of prayer into a den of thieves." Then the 
gracious Saviour overthi'ew their market, and cast them 
all out as an abomination to him. What then would 
" the Messenger of the covenant," pronounce and do, 
if he were to enter an edilice where the preacher is 
maintained in luxury by the ofiicers of the church, 
from money filched from (he toil and stripes of his 
fellow-citizens, from the moans and blood of those 
very persons, whom probably he acknowledges as 
Christians, and with whom they pretend to keep " the 
communion of saints." To such persons may not the 
pungent question be applied — "who may abide the 
day of his coming ?" and may we not also with pecu- 
liar propriety transform the piediction into a prayer — 
" O, thou, who dost purify the sons of Levi, purge 
Ihem as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the 
Lord an offering in rigliteousness." 

But so far as moral means and earthly influence are 
of any value in this connection, the nominal slavc- 
liolding church will remain just what they are, "trust- 
ing in lying words, and sa}'ing — jitace, peace ; — the 
temple of the Lord are these!" — as longas Christian 
women will give "the right hand of fellowship" to 
slave-defiling men. Know ye not, that the pictures of 
the prophets Joel and Amos are strictly applicable to 



INTRODUCTORY. 21 

the letter in myriads of instances among the slave- 
holders, and even of them who profess to be Chris- 
tians ? " They cast lots for my people ; and have 
given a boy for a harlot ; and sold a girl for wine, 
that they might drink. They sold the righteous for 
silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes. They pant 
after the diist of the earth on the hand of the poor, 
and turn aside the way of the meek. A man and his 
father will go in unto the same maid, to profane my 
holy name." Joel iii. 3. Amos ii. 6, 7. Have you 
forgotten the Lord's authoritative mandate and threat- 
ening ? "Thus saith the Lord my God — Feed the 
flock of the slaughter. Whose possessors slay them, 
and hold themselves not guilty ; and they who sell 
them, say — Blessed be the Lord ; for I am rich ; 
and their own shepherds pity them not. I will no more 
pity the inhabitants of the land, saith the Lord." Zech- 
ariah xi. 4, 5, 6. Are you totally insensible to Jeho- 
vah's impressive expostulation and terrific remem- 
brancer ? Proverbs xxiv. 11, 12. "If thou forbear to 
deliver them who are drawn unto death, and those who 
are ready to be slain — if thou sayest, behold, we 
knew it not : doth not he who pondereth the heart, 
consider it } and he who keepeth thy soul, doth not he 
know it ? and shall not he render unto every man ac- 
cording to his works ?" 

To these affecting themes, except as they may be 
unavoidably applicable, our present discussion has no 
immediate reference. Our object now is to elucidate 
the effects of slavery upon the female character, and 
in its connection with households, in its duplicate as- 



22 INTRODUCTORY. 

pect, as it relates both to tlie wives and daughters of 
slave-holders, and to the colored females around them. 
But we might be repelled from proceeding in our at- 
tempt, by the appalling opposition which " the enemies 
of the cross of Christ" will undoubtedly make to 
every endeavor to unfold the moral impurity which is 
inseparable from slavery. Nevertheless, nothing can 
be conceived which is not universally practiced among 
the slave-drivers — and few facts can be disclosed 
which arc not known to every girl who has attained 
the age of puberty. Their mere acquaintance with 
the ungodliness which surrounds them, and the hear- 
ing and seeing of which they cannot possibly avoid, 
are not the sources of complaint. The criminality on 
their part is found in their death-like silence upon 
points which comprise all that is dear to woman in her 
every relation to time and eternity. If only fifty wo- 
men in Virginia or South Carolfna would make such 
an appeal as they could offer to the women of New- 
England, unfolding the condition of all their sex 
among slave-holders, slavery would be abolished in 
one year, in defiance of Martin Van Buren, with his 
traitorous pledge, and of all his blustering accom- 
plices, the women-scourgers and women-destroyers, 
from the Potomac and the Ohio to the Mexican gulf 
American slavery is often condemned as unjust and 
inhuman ; but it is also more pernicious, when con- 
sidered as the ever-flowing fountain of all uncleanness. 
That profligacy is not even attempted to be concealed. 
It is public, notorious, and uncovered as the daylight. 
Mothers and sisters are acquainted with the flagrant 



INTRODUCTOllY. 2:1 

sensuality of their sons and bi-others. "\\'i\es and 
daughters are certified of the conptant adulterous in- 
tercourse of tiieir husbands and fatlieis. Tliis social 
degeneracy has been continually increasing, and now 
is e .tending itself in an equal ratio with the numerical 
progression of the slaves. IMinisters of the gospel in 
the southern States know tliese heaven-daring crimes 
to be undeniable ; and yet by their silence they virtu- 
ally sanction them. They may suspect, or believe, or 
be assured of the most nefarious iniquity. They may 
hear the complaints of violated females, and dishon- 
ored wives and daughters. ^11 is vain .' The testi- 
mony of c(;lored women is inadmissible ; and other 
direct evidence cannot be obtained ; and tlius the 
Ethiopian's skin is gradually transforming into the hue 
of the Circassian's. 

Now suppose that the same course of life could be 
commenced in New-England ; that men of all classes 
and filling every station of civil and ecclesiastical 
honor and influence, at once should sever all the bonds 
of duty and vows of affection, and organize a perren- 
nial system of all diversified pollution, — would the 
daughters of the pilgrims calmly sit down, fold their 
arms, watch the iniquitous process, and tacitly admit 
that machination to be prolonged, until precedent was 
pleaded for law ; and the antiquity and extension of 
the sin were alleged as proofs of chastity and inno- 
cence ? JVot ul all. The ^mritan women would raise a 
moral hail-storm and whirlwind within twenty-four 
hours, which would so affright their "lords and mas- 
ters," that they would hide themselves "in the dens 



24 INTRODUCTORY. 

and in the rocks of the mountains ;" whence they 
would not dare to come forth to obtain absolution, 
until they had verified their penitence, and solemnly 
vowed immediate cessation from their sin, and faithful 
and lasting amendments. 

There is an example for the women of the south. 
Multitudes of them are partially guiltless, except that 
tliey do not •' put on the whole armor of God, and 
stand against the wiles of tlie devil." They mourn 
over that iniquity which they feel themselves too pow- 
erless efficiently to resist. Hence it is our duty in 
New-England to " come to the rescue ;" and to di- 
vulge those awful corruptions which our sisters among 
the slave-holders dare not reveal. On their behalf, to 
draw aside the veil which conceals the grand slave- 
holding " mystery of iniquity." J'or their sakes, to 
depict that "working of Satan," which crushes them 
with agony and degradation — and thus to expedite 
that hallowed period and state of society, when the 
connubial obligations shall be more than a ceremonial 
form ; female purity shall not depend upon the power 
and the will to exercise brutal violence ; all do- 
mestic relations shall not be abolished at the impulse 
of lascivious dfs-'ires and pecuniary demands ; and a 
million of women shall not constitute one vast ha- 
rem where men-stealers may prowl, corrupt, and de- 
stroy. 

An additional gloomy and portentous development 
of the wicked influence of slavery has recently been 
forced upon us, which, in its moral and religious com- 
binations, should produce continuous alarm, with the 



INTRODUCTORY. 25 

profoundest contrition. Since the friends of gospel 
liberty and Christian benevolence have more loudly- 
reiterated their demands for the abolition of slavery, 
and have made their assaults more directly upon the 
enormous sin of that consociation which fills the 
church of God with those persons who are denounced 
by Moses, the Jewish law-giver, and by Paul, the 
apostle of the Gentiles, as " men-stealers," — for they 
are " sinners of the first rank, and guilty of the highest 
kind of theft," as the Presbyterian confession of faith 
declared — and as the Methodist discipline afiirms, 
they never had a " sincere desire to be saved, and to 
flee from the wrath to come," — the slave-drivers and 
their northern confederates, who, when they " see the 
thief, consent with him, and are partakers with adul- 
terers," (Psalm 1. 16,22;) all of them who «'hate 
instruction, and cast the words of the mighty God be- 
hind them," have coalesced, directly or remotely, " to 
pervert the right ways of the Lord;" and after the 
example of Satan, to cite "the scripture of truth" as 
a sanction for falsehood ; and the Lord's " instruction 
for righteousness," as infallible authority for those fla- 
gitious crimes which violate the whole divine moral law. 
If there be any one iniquity which is prominently em- 
blazoned in "the oracles of God," as a topic of ad- 
monition, warning, denunciation, and curse, it is the 
transgression of the seventh commandment. Female 
purity is an especial object of Jehovah's government 
among mankind. It would seem from Genesis vi. 1, 
2, that the deluge was sent as a punishment for licen- 
tiousness. It certainly was the cause of the fire and 



26 iNTRODUCTORr. 

brimstone which consumed Sodom and Gomorrha. 
In many recorded instances, it was the immediate 
source of the misery which the Israelites and other 
nations realized. The sacred volume is full of illus- 
trations and discussions upon that suhject. Lot, Da- 
vid, Solomon, Herod, with many other personages re- 
nowned in ancient history, while modern Europe re- 
peats the mournful tale, all certify, that the sins against 
female chastity and matrimonial purity ever are at- 
tended by the severest exhibitions of God's dis- 
pleasure. 

The annals of mankind do not afTord a parallel, 
either in enormity, or extent, or continuance, to the 
degradation of the colored women in the United States. 
Despoiled of all protection ; exposed to every indig- 
nity ; obliged to submit to the brutal demand of any 
lawless white man ; coerced to degradation by heart- 
rending tortures ; doomed to sacritice the tender- 
cst affections ; scourged to conceal their instinctive 
sensii)ilities ; and robbed of a husband's love, a fa- 
ther's guardianship, a son's aid, and a brother's en- 
dearment ; they are merely human tools to pander to 
the sensuality, and to gratify the unclean desires of 
their inhuman task-masters. Among slaves, matri- 
mony is unknown ; and in some very few cases where 
a pretended form is impiously engaged in as a mock 
sanction to the cohabitation of a colored man and wo- 
man, the promise is not exacted by the base and ser- 
vile preacher, that the bridegroom and bride shall live 
faithfully as husband and wife until death severs them, 
but "as long as circumstances 7cill permit;" in other 



INTRODUCTORY. 27 

words, until the man-stealer wants money, and can 
sell one or both of them, with an impassable distance 
between them — and instead of using the Lord's words, 
"What God hath joined together, let not man put 
asunder," he altogether omits the divine approba- 
tion of their union, or substitutes his own adage — 
WJiat slave-drivers join together, let men-sfcalers put 
asunder. 

Hence the slave States are one vast brothel, in 
which multiform incests, polygamy, adultery, and other 
uncleanness are constantly perpetrated — and there is 
not a man, or woman, or boy, or girl, or any who has 
arrived at the age of puberty, that is not acquainted 
with nearly the whole mass of abominations. 

All the upholders of slavery have fellowship with 
that "throne of iniquity which frameth mischief by law.'' 
" They gather themselves together against the soul of 
the righteous, and condemn the innocent blood." The 
truth in this connection cannot be contemplated with- 
out dismay. Direful as are the effects of slavery in 
political, civil, and social aspects, yet it is " lighter 
than dust in the balance," when contrasted with the 
novel manifestations of the spirit, tendency and claims 
of that iniquitous system, which will, ere long, sweep 
over our southern republics in a whirlwind of desola- 
tion, unless the monsters be caught and drowned in 
the Atlantic. In the religious application of the woful 
requisitions of that accursed enemy of mankind, its 
withering pestilence is most to be dreaded. The en- 
listing of the sacred volume into an authoritative sanc- 
tion of slavery is the last " refuge of lies" in which 



28 INTRODUCTORY. 

" the sinners and hypocrites in Zion" can entrench 
themselves. The walls of the town of " carnal pol- 
icy" have been battered down. The tower of expe- 
diency has been demolished. The cannons of gradual 
emancipation have been spiked. The sword of Afri- 
can colonization has been so blunted by attempting to 
hew in pieces the rock of emancipation, that when it 
is now drawn out for warfare, it only excites ridicule 
and contempt. All the weapons Avhich kidnappers have 
used, having been found powerless against the artil- 
lery of truth, the ecclesiastical slave-drivers and soul- 
traders, in the spirit of their prototypes, the Egyptian 
magicians, are striving with their enchantments to 
convince the successors of Pharoah, that the mandates 
of Jehovah are only a contrivance of " incendiary 
fanatics," after the ancient example of Moses and 
Aaron, to render the slave discontented and to hinder 
their work. 

Without controversy, this is the modern fulfilment 
of the dread and capital charge which the apostle 
Paul alleged against the old Romans — " They changed 
the truth of God into a lit." That is a solemn and un- 
deniable fact in reference to those pretended biblical 
critics, expositors, and pro-slavery theologians who 
professedly adduce the holy scriptures, their doc- 
trines, precepts, and examples, as a justification for 
American slavery. In the Mosaic laws, or in the New 
Testament, no Jesuitical ingenuity of corruption can 
quote one sentence which in any form countenances 
that servitude which exists in the United States of 
America. Excluding all irrelevant topics, we defy 



INTRODUCTORY. 29 

any man to adduce from the law, or the prophets, or 
the psalms, or the evangelists and apostles, one soli- 
tary word which justifies the dissolution of the nuptial 
covenant ; and destroys all domestic relations ; and 
necessarily transforms men and women into fornica- 
tors and adulterers ; and fetters every woman as a 
creature for defilement without redress or possibility 
of escape whenever her vile tyrants choose to tram- 
ple upon the seventh commandment. 

Notwithstanding all persons who are acquainted 
with the theory and practices of slavery in our land, 
know that it is one unmingled mass of the basest tur- 
pitude ; and that slavery, as it is established by law 
among us, cannot possibly co-exist with marriage, fe- 
male chastity, and domestic relationship ; yet the 
abominations are sustained by the professedly Chris- 
tian churches ; and D. D's., professers of theology, 
with an almost interminable race of inferior writers 
and disputants, all unite in the shout, "Great is Di- 
ana of the Ephesians," — or, in their wondrous phra- 
seology, which is the inspiration of the father of lies, 
"Slavery is sanctioned by the bible," — in other 
words, that the transformation of twelve hundred thou- 
sands of native born American women into creatures 
to be used whenever the men-stealers please, for loath- 
some intercourse, is "bible doctrine." 

It may be retorted that this representation of the 
pro-slavery ecclesiastics is indecorous and reproachful. 
I deny that objection. It is unimpeachably accurate. 
The defence of slavery which is now carried on in 
the United States, is chiefly if not entirely managed 



30 



INTRODUCTORY, 



by individual preachers, so called, and congregated 
bodies of them, who avowedly represent the denomi- 
nations and churches to which they appertain. The 
religious ne\vspa[iers have long been agitating the 
question ; and wliere the controvertists on both sides 
are permitted to issue their opinions, in almost all 
cases, it is ascertained that the defenders of slave- 
driving and slave-trading, in name, are ministers of 
the gospel ; who, like Elymas the sorcerer, by their 
being enemies of 7'ighteousness, demonstrate that they 
are " full of all subtility and mischief." 

Loud lamentations are often heard respecting the 
prevalence of the sins of uncleanness. Laudable ex- 
ertions are made to sustain the general cause of moral 
reform ; and much good has been achieved. But may it 
not be justly asked, what substantial benefit, what gen- 
uine amendment can consistently be hoped for, while 
rapes, incests, and all other ungodliness of the most 
nefarious atrocity, are virtually enacted by law as in- 
nocence — and while ministers of the gospel exercise 
all their ingenuity to persuade those who believe their 
"fables and endless genealogies, that a system of 
complex moral filthiness absolutely unknown to all 
other ages ai»d countries, is the appointment of Jeho- 
vah, and that these abominations are the legitimate 
offspring of "bible doctrine." 

It requires very little discernment to prove that this 
hell-born contrivance necessarily opens the flood-gates 
of all iniquity — and it would be just as infatuated to 
expect to " gather grapes from thorns, and figs from 
thistles," as to anticipate anything but horrible poUu- 



INTRODUCTORY. 31 

tions in the slave-holding States while the public ex- 
positors of " the oracles of God," pertinaciously sus- 
tain, if they do not directly inculcate, the j^eneral prin- 
ciple, that American women with a colored skin are 
only found to be slaves for odious lusts. 

Within a very short period, the justification and 
defence of slavery have been undertaken by men of 
several different denominations — and however much 
they maybe at variance upon nearly all other topics, yet 
upon that iniquity and in support of it, they perfectly 
coalesce. A contemptible discourse was lately read 
and published by an Episcopalian minister in North 
Carolina, and to it the prelate of that diocess appended 
his authentic official sanction. Many Baptists have 
also promulged their views upon the subject ; and 
they generally hold, as far as the south is concerned, 
that slavery is right, and accurately do they fulfil the 
divine declaration — the possessors of slaves "slay 
the flock of the slaughter and hold themselves not 
guilty;" and the men-traders who sell them say, 
" Blessed be the Lord, for I am rich, and their own 
shepherds pity them not." 

The Presbyterian general assembly, and the Method- 
ist conferences are still more criminal than the minor 
ecclesiastical bodies ; for they have directly nullified, 
as far as they can, by their ecclesiastical enactments, 
the law of God, and their own avowed creeds of faith 
and rules of discipline, and thus have obliterated the 
spirit and requirements of Christianity. By their 
impious usurpations, and by persecuting the staunch 
friends of emancipation, and by their approval of the 



32 INTRODUCTORV. 

existing system of slavery, and its prolongation, they 
do boldly proclaim before the whole world, that the 
debasement of twelve hundred thousands of American 
women, as victims of ungovernable lust, and the dis- 
solution of all domestic relations and privileges among 
two millions and a half of American citizens, are " bi- 
ble doclrine ;" and that the " southern institutions " arc 
in full accordance with the providential appointments 
of Jehovah, as ratified by that word which is " the 
lamp of our feet and the light of our path ;" by that 
" word which shall judge us at the last day." This is 
the climax of all iniquity ; and if there be any way to 
understand the signs of the times, or to interpret God's 
revealed will ; we may anticipate, both as churches 
and as a nation, without a speedy repentance and re- 
form, that tremendous retribution which will make 
" every man's ears that heareth it to tingle." 



CHAPTER II. 



MARRIAGE. 



The whole order of human society is based upon 
the grand principle which was announced by Jehovah 
at the creation of the world. Genesis ii. 18 — 24. "It 
is not good that man should be alone. 1 will make 
him a help meet for him. Therefore shall a man leave 
his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his 
wife ; and they shall be one flesh." That comprises 
the divine appointment of matrimony which was rati- 
fied by the Lord Jesus Christ himself Matthew xix. 
3 — 6. To which the inspired apostle adds, as the 
fundamental object and condition of the nuptial cove- 
nant, both as to the fact and to the restriction — "Let 
every man have his own wife, and let every woman 
have her own husband." 

Many persons intimate that it is indecorous and in- 
delicate to talk of marriage '^nd its obligations; but 
they forget that the domestic union of man and woman 
preceded all other relations and laws — that much of 
the Jewish economy is specially devoted to that sub- 
ject — that no small portion of the sacred history ad- 
verts to that important theme — that the larger quan- 
tity of the crimes and miseries which have deluged 



34 MARRIAGE. 

the world, flows from the violation of that primitive law 
of the all-wise Creator ; and in the application of the 
rule to our present topic, that slavery could not exist 
for one moment, if the ordinance of Paradise, as au- 
thoritatively expounded by Immanuel, were practically 
enforced. 

Female chastity is the corner-stone of society. // is 
ivoman's instinct to be undefded. The very fact that 
God has appointed that she shall be honorably wooed, 
prior even to the sanctified and endeared intercourse 
of connubial life, is a plain proof that her every natu- 
ral sensibility revolts from personal contamination. 
Now this inestimable attribute which combines the 
wife's affection, the mother's love, and the sister's ten- 
derness, in all their energetic purity, is entirely eradi- 
cated by slavery. The system of servitude which is 
the curse of the southern States, and the grand source 
of contention and mischief to our whole republic, totally 
destroys the constitution of things of divine appoint- 
ment ; and disturbs those relations which are of vital 
interest, not only to the social prosperity but also to 
the existence of mankind. 

It is a remarkable circumstance in the history of the 
world, that a departure from the primitive law of God 
respecting marriage has always been attended with the 
divine malediction. It was the origin of that inordi- 
nate wickedness which produced the desolation of the 
world at the deluge. It was the unfailing cause of al- 
most all the crimes and punishments of the Israelites ; 
from their first aberration in the wilderness, through 
the enticements of the daughters of Moab and the 



MARRIAGE. 35 

Midianitish women, until their captivity in Assyria and 
in Babylon. In modern periods it has been the prolific 
parent of that darkness, penury, bondage and guilt, 
with their concomitant misery, which have overspread 
the European nations. From the north to the south 
pole, and from the western capes of Europe and Af- 
rica, round to the eastern points of America, at this 
day, the moral and mental character of the human fam- 
ily, and the domestic and social comforts of the peo- 
ple, and the national prosperity and improvements of 
the various separate communities, are all determined 
by their degree of conformity to that original law of 
Jehovah respecting marriage, which was proclaimed 
in the garden of Eden on the day when man was cre- 
ated. Slavery necessarily abrogates that law : and it 
ever has cursed the nations who adopted that system, 
or who have introduced and fostered its evils. They 
have invariably been visited and requited with tremen- 
dous retribution. 

There is an analogy of contrast equally convincing 
as analogies of similitude ; and that furnished by the 
only historian of the primeval ages is a fountain of in- 
struction. The Israelites in Egypt were additionally 
oppressed as they increased in numbers, and multiplied 
in proportion to their augmented afflictions. Finally 
to subserve their i.varice and sensuality, and to extir- 
pate the alarms which their own despotism produced, 
a decree was promulgated by the Pharoahs, that every 
son of the Israelites should be cast into the river im- 
mediately after its birth. The wrath of man, however, 
was so restrained that the royal tyrant's own daughter 



36 MARRIAGE, 

became the guardian of the future emancipator of the 
enslaved tribes ; and the Egyptians who had doomed 
Israel to extinction by the drowning of their whole male 
race, afterwards realized the anguish which they had 
designed to inflict by the simultaneous death of the 
first-born child in every family throughout that whole 
nation of slave-holding task-masters. At midnight 
there was a great cry throughout all Egypt. There 
was neither time for aid, nor place for sympathy, nor 
exercise of condolence, nor exemption from terror. 
Weeping, and wailing, and horror, and death, were 
identical, instantaneous, and universal ! 

Remember the United States ! Slaveholders are 
copying Pharoah and his ungodly courtiers and inferior 
rulers to the minutest characteristic ; and with addi- 
tional iniquities of which it is presumed those drowned 
slave-holders were not guilty. By the inscrutable dis- 
pensations of God, our ancestors were allowed to sail 
to Africa. There they kidnapped and brought to the 
United States all the living men and women who were 
not wounded or mutilated in the hideous wars and pirat- 
ical incursions which the white men-stealers bribed and 
paid the tribes on the western coast of Africa to com- 
mence and prolong until the cargoes of "human cat- 
tle" were stolen to be transferred to the American col- 
onies. From the first day to the present hour, these 
kidnapped Africans and their descendants, of all grades 
and hues, have been doomed, by law, to unintermitting 
toil and agonies. Every measure which hell-inspired 
craftiness can contrive, has been authorized, and with 
equal solicitude executed, without one kindly emotion 



MARRIAGE. 37 

or humane consideration, to obtain the largest possible 
proportion of manual labor, and of the moans of luxu- 
rious indulgence, at the lowest expense. Yet that un- 
godly scheme has only increased the number of slaves 
in a fearful ratio ; who, lilie those " of whom thy world 
was not worthy, have trial of cruel mockings and 
scourgings, being destitute, afflicted, and tormented." 
The rapid multiplication of the slaves has been at- 
tended with proportionately increased danger to the 
slave-holders ; and therefore new scenes of oppression 
are constantly unfolding in the legislative enactments 
to crush the rising spirit of freedom. The desecration 
of the Lord's day, the silence of preachers, the priva- 
tion of all instruction for both worlds, and the robbery 
of every immunity which belongs to them by donation 
from their Creator, with the unceasing lacerations and 
defilement and barbarities which they continually re- 
alize, only enlarge their multitudes and strengthen 
their physical energies ; until it is manifest that their 
deliverance from the house of bondage must speedily 
be effected either by Christian philanthropy, or by the 
wrathful interposition of the righteous Judge. 

It is not a little marvellous, also, that the Lord is 
permitting a system which is promoted from the very 
worst motives and for the most corrupt object which 
possibly can exist among men, to involve eventually, 
and it may be feared with most appalling terrors, the 
liberation of the slaves and the punishment of their 
impure and unrelenting tormentors — the propagation 
of slaves as articles of merchandize. The rearing of 
human creatures expressly for the degradation of slav- 



S8 MARRIAGE. 

ery, now is as regular and systematized a traffic among 
American citizens, as the culture of the farm. In 
countless instances, many of the southern families live 
in sloth and voluptuousness and ''frolic," solely from 
the annual sales of the colored people as they arrive 
at the ordinary age of manhood Hence it is no won- 
der that in comparison, the colored people should in- 
crease with so much more celerity than the white pop- 
ulation. The trade in " breeding u'enches," and the 
constant contrivances to diminish the sable color, to 
augment the number, and to extend the traffic of slaves, 
are facts notorious as the existence of slavery itself ; 
and every attempt to extend the United States by ad- 
mitting slave-holding communities into the Common- 
wealth, is merely expanding the present market for our 
colored citizens ; and directly sanctioning that hell- 
born system which encourages its adherents to " work 
all uncleanness with greediness." 

Ere many years shall have elapsed, a voice will be 
heard from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, reverbera- 
ting in frightful thunders : " How long wilt thou refuse 
to humble thyself before me ? Let my people go, that 
they may serve me." At that eventful period the pro- 
digious numbers of the colored people will constitute 
the scorpions with which the divine Liberator in equi- 
table retribution will chastise this "sinful nation, a peo- 
ple laden with iniquity, a seed of evil-doers, and chil- 
dren who are corrupters ; who have forsaken the Lord, 
and provoked the Holy One of Israel unto anger," 

Slavery abrogates the law and institution of mar- 
riage ; the prime object of which ordinance is this : to 



MARRIAGE. o9 

preserve the native purity of woman in all its unsullied 
freshness and primitive vigor. 

No subject in this reference is more painful and hu- 
miliating than the constant and universally desolating 
effects which slavery produces upon women. It is al- 
together unfair and irrational to argue respecting the 
condition of persons in the heathen lands, and similar 
scenes in our own republic. Comparisons are often 
made between the debasement, nudity, and brutalized 
habits of many tribes of the native Asiatics, Africans, 
and Americans — and a justification of slavery in our 
southern States has been attempted from the deception 
that the situation of the slave is ameliorated by a trans- 
fer from the eastern to the western shores of the Atlan- 
tic, and that the plantations of Carolina and Georgia 
are superior residences to the wilds of Congo and 
Guinea for the kidnapped descendants of Ham. The 
proposition thus enounced and so often depicted in flat- 
tering vision, and illustrated by romantic tales of imag- 
ination, is a gross fallacy, an essential part of the cor- 
rupt and mendacious system of slavery. 

E.xaiiiine this subject in one application. It was ilic 
appointment of God after the original transgression, 
that the human family, to distinguish them from the 
beasts of the field, should be clothed ; not only to pre- 
serve them from the inclement weather which sin had 
introduced into the world, but also to guard them 
against those unholy propensities which would other- 
wise render the exi.«tence of mankind in large commu- 
nities utterly impossible. In all countries where the 
people are nearly or quite all divested of clothing, 



40 MARRIAGE. 

woman is a mere slave shut up in comparative seclu- 
sion ; wiiilc the consociations of men are small and 
barbarous. Jealousy, lust, i-aajc, and ferocity in all 
their malignapt characteristics there mark our species. 
Nor are those turbulent passions much diminished 
among those people who considci and treat women 
meiely as objects for menial drudgery and voluptuous 
gratification. Long inured habits and custom from in- 
fancy produce little or no amendment in this respect ; 
for among the benighted tribes of men, where clothing 
is scarcely used, their condition in a moral aspect pre- 
cludes all accurate conception ; and in reference to 
that cardinal female attribute, modeslij, it is only the 
animal instinct impelled I>y human depravity. 

Now ail tiie degradation and pollution which that 
picture exhibits, are developed in actual life in our 
slave-holding Elates with inexpressible ag2ravations ; 
so that it is utterly impossible for the colored people 
to ac(}uirc any accurate and sterling views cf the ex- 
terior obligations and spirituality of the seventh com- 
niandmeiit. Consequently, to anticipate moral purity 
from the slave or from tho slave-holder, is equally 
irrational as to pretend to change the Ethiopian's 
skin or the leopard's s|)ots. 1 do not imply that all 
slaves aie unclean ; much less would I intimate that 
every slave-driver directly violates that mandate, 
"Thou slialt not commit adultery ;" but the exceptions 
are comparatively few ; and unavoidably so, because 
chastity and niatrimonial Iidelity arc equally opposed 
to the ungodly system which they sustain ; and di- 
rectly subversive of their pecuniary interests and 



MARRIAGE. 41 

worldly advancement ; exclusive of their attractive ca- 
pacity to gratify " the lust of the flesh, and the lust of 
the eyes, and the pride of life." 

This inference is enforced by two dreadful facts 
which are indissolubly conjoined with slavery. 1. The 
ordinary code of morals is totally nullified when it is 
enforced in reference to the colored citizens. For ex- 
ample : it would be disgraceful publicly to curse a 
preacher to his face — but it is not deemed at all pro- 
fane, or at best, a very venial offence to curse a slave. 
It is dangerous to stab a white man of equal or inferior 
rank in society — but it is an insult for one "gentle- 
man" to taunt his drunken, gambling associate that he 
had " killed a nigger." It would cost the ruffian his 
life if he were forcibly to violate a planter's wife, or 
daughter, or sister, or niece — but he may scourge 
and torture first, and afterwards defile as many colored 
females as he pleases, not only with impunity, but he 
will boast of his heaven-defying abominations, and be 
eulogized and envied. It would not be politic or safe, 
probably to go into a court-house, and there formally 
attest upon oath to circumstances, the perverse false- 
hood of which could be evinced by indubitable counter 
testimony, but he may commit wilful and corrupt per- 
jury at every term of court, respecting the colored 
citizens ; and although every man in the county around 
him personally knows his entire contradiction to truth 
and justice, yet no man can punish him ; and nine- 
tenths of the slave-drivers would admire and praise 
him for his effrontery and example ; while the others 
would tacitly sanction bis crimes and conceal his im- 



42 MARRIAGE, 

piotis audacity. 2. i heie is no law against fcinaio 
violation and no redress ibr the injured colored woman. 
No earthly tribunal exists to which she can appeal. 
Not only are the civil courts ol' law closed against her 
complaints, but it' she has been called by divine grace, 
and is conscientiously solicitous to "abstain from Heshly 
lusts, which war against the soul," yet if her " Chris- 
tian" master, an officer or member of the same church 
to which she belongs, forces her, she dare not complain. 
The minister would not regard her ; the church would 
not hear her charge ; and her tyrant would only tor- 
ture her and repeat his ungodliness with aggravations. 
Thus even the colored Christian women with the most 
delicate virgin modesty and women with the most 
reserved chastity and f lithfulness -to their lovers, are 
almost univer.sally doomed to submit to defilements 
which they loathe, and to agonies of conscience equally 
perplexing and full of disquietude ; because the civil 
jurisdiction legalizes their debasement, and the church 
tacitly sanctifies their habitual pollution and groans. 
Their appeal for deliverance can be made to God 
alone ; and however long the Hearer of prayer may 
delay the answer, yet the prophetic vision is equally 
applicable in this case, as to myiiads of other events 
in divine Providence. " The vision is yet for an ap- 
pointed time ; but at the end it shall speak, and not lie. 
Though it tarry, wait for it ; because it will surely 
come, it will not tarry." Habakkuk ii. 3. 

The following narrative is related by Mr. Fitch, of 
Boston, in his eloquent essay, entitled, '^ Slave-holding 
weighed in the balance of Truth.'' A physician in 



MARRIAGE. 43 

WashiiTgton, who is a Christian, originally communi- 
cated the conscience-harrowing fact. "There is," 
said that pious physician, "residing in this city, 
(Washington) a young female slave who 's a member 
of the same church to which 1 belong. She is a mu- 
latto, and her complexion nearly white. One day she 
came to me in great trouble and distiess, and wished 
me to tell her what she could do. She stated to me 
that her master's son was in the practice of compelling 
her, whenever he pleased, to go with him to his bed. 
She had been obliged to submit to it, and she knew of 
no way to obtain any relief She could not appeal to 
her master for protection, for he was guilty of like 
practices himself What could she do .'' Poor girl ! 
She dared not to lift a hand in self-defence. She could 
not flee, for she was a slave. She would be brought 
back and beaten, and be placed in a worse condition than 
before. There she was, a pious girl, with all the feel- 
ings of her heart alive to the woes of her condition, 
the victim of the brutal lusts of a dissolute young man; 
with no means of defence or of escape, and no pros- 
pect before her but that of being again and again 
polluted, whenever his unbridled passions should dic- 
tate." 

Yet this is the system which ministers of the gospel 
of almost all denominations maintain to be conformable 
to the revealed will of God, which collegiate professors 
teach for moral philosophy ; which biblical commenta- 
tors and doctors, Divinifalis and Diaboli, announce as 
"Bible doctrine ;" and which general assemblies, sy- 
nods, conferences, conventions, and associations de- 



44 MARRIAGE. 

liberately sustain as the grand cement of their eccle- 
siastical confederacy. In truth, they formally annul 
that hallowed institution which is coeval with the exist- 
ence of mankind, and without which the human family 
within fifty years, would be nearly extinct. Neither 
Asiatic polygamy, nor even the Popish celibacy is 
equally nefarious and execrable in its reference to the 
law of chastity, and the transgressions of the seventh 
commandment as the accursed system of servitude in the 
United States. Nor is there one prophetic denunciation 
contained in the sacred volume which is directed against 
the Mohammedan imposture and the Roman apostacy, 
that is not equally applicable to American bondage ; 
for it is justly entitled to the same characteristic appel- 
latives ; and to it may be justly said — "Slavery! thou 
art the mother of harlots and the abominations of the 
earth ; and the king of slave-drivers is the angel of 
the bottomless pit, whose name is Appollyon, the de- 
stroyer !" While the judgment of God against im- 
penitent slave-drivers, as announced by the apostle 
from Patmos, is "Bible doctrine that will stand." 
Revelations xxi. 8. "The fearful and unbelieving, 
and the abominable and murderers, and whoremon- 
gers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall 
have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and 
brimstone." 



CHAPTER III. 



CONDITION OF FEMALE SLAVES. 

"There Mammon liatli its altars 

Wot o'er with human blood ; 
And hideous lust debases 

The workmanship of God." Whilticr. 

The subject before us is intensely impressive, and 
demands so forcible an application, that the repetition of 
a remark is excusable. It has already been stated that 
♦he torturers of the enslaved colored women admit, 
on their part, of no evasion or redress ; because the 
Avhole code of slave legislation is diabolically contrived 
to admit the slave-drivers and the kidnappers to perpe- 
irato their heinous crimes with impunity. 

What are the cardinal principles of American 
slavery ? Slaves are under the absolute power of their 
kidnappers ; and are deemed to be chattels and per- 
sonal estate, except in the case of descents, when they 
are real estate. They cannot acquire or possess prop- 
erty. A slave can make no contract ; not even the 
covenant of marriage ; and above all, cannot be a 
witness in any cause where any of the parties are 
white persons ; and dare not attempt to resist the as- 
sault of the despotic slave-drivers, who would maim the 



46 CONDITION OF 

man that has offended him, or violate the girl upon 
whom he has fixed his lascivious desires. 

1. In this concise summary, therefore, is instantly 
seen the helpless debasement in which the law-makers 
of the southern States have immured the colored 
women. The doomed victim of lust cannot ascertain 
how to escape her pollution and anguish. It is true 
the law of God enacts, (Deuteronomy xxiii. 15, IG) — 
" Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant 
who is escaped from his master unto thee. He shall 
dwell with thee, among you, in that place which he 
shall choose, where it liketh him best ; thou shalt not 
oppress him." But the detestable laws of our country 
are in direct opposition to the enactment of Jehovah. 
A young woman, sensitive as feminine modesty can 
imbue her with decorum, is agonized with constant so- 
licitations voluntarily to abandon herself to her tyrant 
driver, or his son, or both of them, and intimidated 
with menaces of their scourging, if she resists their 
authority and lecherous desires. A white girl can fly 
to a father, or a brother, or a friend, or to the civil 
magistrate, to shield her from pollution. There may be 
scarcely any perceptible difference of color. The 
young woman may be intellectual, refined, far superior 
to her debased condition, animated with the purest and 
most delicate affection for an associate of her own 
class, and above all a conscientious Christian ; but she 
has no father to extricate her from her perilous condi- 
tion. Her own brother may be the debauchee who is re- 
solved to violate her. Her sole friend and lover would 
instantly be murdered by slow-paced tortures if he 



FEMALE SLAVES. 47 

dared to murmur, much less to oppose the vile design, 
or if their mutual attachment was only suspected. 
Complaint to a justice of the peace would be an- 
swered by urging his own claim to the right of carnal 
knowledge of her, or by commanding the public whip- 
pers to give " her fifty lashes well laid on." 

In the case already alluded to, a white woman may 
elude the attempt to dishonor her by flying from the 
scene of danger, but a female slave must remain. Not 
in one case out of a thousand could she escape. Her 
seizure, after attempting to elope, would insure the 
most horrible punishment, while it would not exempt 
her from the moral anguish which she would also en- 
dure ; and thus she has no alternative but participa- 
tion in the most revolting guilt which woman is doomed 
to suffer, 

2. The female slave upon whom her kidnapper has 
fixed his " eyes full of adultury, and that cannot cease 
from sin," is not only unable to deliver herself by 
flight, but she has no means of resistance. A white 
woman could assume the attitude of self-defence, and 
if she wounded, maimed, or even killed her brutal as- 
sailant, the law would exculpate her, and she would be 
honored for her resistance ; but she who has a colored 
skin dares not to resist or attempt any opposition ; and 
if through the impulse of desperation ©he should inflict 
a wound upon her ravisher in the very attempt, she 
would forfeit her mortal existence if the fact was pre- 
sented to one of their execrable criminal courts ; and 
if that course was not adopted, her whole future life 
would be the subject of her despot's unceasing and 
malicious revenge. 



48 CONDITION OF 

The forcible defilement of a woman constitutes a 
flagitious transgression against which the divine reve- 
lation denounces its solemn condemnation ; and to re- 
press which, even our statutes declare that the convic- 
tion of the otTender shall insure severe punishment. 
Nevertheless, in reference to the colored woman, the 
mandates of God are totally abrogated, and the laws of 
our country virtually sanctify the crime. 

The ensuing occurrence is one example of the ordi- 
nary transactions of life in the southern States. The 
facts are as public as the houses in which the parties 
resided. 

A lawyer, with a wife and several children, was 
elected to the Legislature of V'irginia. Speedily after 
his arrival in Richmond to attend the House of Dele- 
(jates, he went to the human Jlesh viarkct and purchased 
a superior mulatto girl, expressly for the purposes of 
concubinage during his stay in Richmond. The young 
woman, after the session was closed, accompanied him 
to the village in which he resided. One of his first 
acts was to dislodge his wife and children from his own 
dwelling-house, and to rent for them another habita- 
tion, while he transferred to their abode his " likely 
negro wench." Thus he openly lived, retaining his 
otHcial station, making and expounding laws, dis- 
honoring his wife and daughters, and training up his 
sons after his own ungodly example. Speedily subse- 
quent to that woman's arrival from Richmond, and 
when her relation to the lawyer was publicly avowed 
by her occupancy of his usual residence, to the exclu- 
sion of his wife and legitimate children, a lady of the 



FEMALE SLAVES. 49 

vicinity inquired of the abused creature respecting her 
connection with her adulterous paramour. With great 
modesty she detailed her previous anguish. When it 
was intimated to her that she was to be sold, she had 
no suspicions of the direct consequences of the trans- 
fer. Every allurement had been held out by the auc- 
tioneer to procure a good price for her, on account of 
her capacity fof usefulness in all domestic affairs. 'J he 
first evening atlter the purchase, the legislator made 
known his design in buying her ; that she might be 
his concubine during his sojourn in Richmond, after 
which she should go with him into the country. She re- 
fused compliance, and resisted his attempts to force her ; 
because he could not easily execute his base scheme 
in the tavern where he resided, dreading the noise which 
she would make. He instantly contrived a plan to have 
her decoyed into a place of secrecy, where complaints 
and resistance would be equally unavailing, and 
pretended to put her out to board. As bOon as she was 
secure in one of those dark and secret dens of pollu- 
tion which are so numerous in Richmond, he appeared, 
made known to her the helpless situation in which she 
was immured, and repeated his demands. Finding all 
other means ineffectual, with the aid of the monsters 
to whose guard he had committed her, he scourged 
her most unmercifully, until through conjoined agony 
and terror she was obliged to yield. Then she was 
removed to the tavern as his domestic servant ; and 
thence proceeded with him to his residence. In the 
character of his avowed companion, within sight of his 
family, he associated for years with that colored wo- 
man, eating his ordinary meals far more frequently 
with her than with his almost heart-broken wife and 



50 CONDITION OF 

daughters, the eldest of whom, conscious of her fa- 
ther's ungodliness, was almost ashamed to be seen ; 
and finally, at the door of his own house, sold her and 
several children which she had borne to him. 

The above is an exhibition of that brutal usage to 
which the female slaves are ever exposed, uad which 
they almost constantly experience. 

3. Another indescribable evil follows from the 
dreadful truth that the wretched victim of the slave- 
driver's unbridled lasciviousness is debarred from all 
complaint, so that she can obtain neither redress for 
past injury, nor exemption from future involuntary par- 
ticipation in crime. Nothing can be more criminal 
and outrageous in insensibility, than the fact that men 
have invented a plan to exclude every murmur against 
oppression and to silence the cry of the injured and 
agonized for relief What more unnatural ? Men 
deliberately have enacted as fundamental laws of so- 
cial action and national policy, that one class of their 
fellow-citizens shall have no right to complain and no 
power to testify. What more awful } Ministers of 
the gospel, and ecclesiastical assemblies, and conven- 
tions, and conferences, and associations openly sanc- 
tion the system of "abomination which maketh deso- 
late," and which renders all church discipline a nul- 
lity. To complete the astounding enormity of wicked- 
edness, they also daringly promulge as oracular truth, 
that the Holy Bible sanctions those ungodly deeds and 
exonerates the hardened perpetrator as guiltless in the 
judgment of "Jesus the Son of God." 

It is a law of the slave plantation and of every slave- 
holder's domain, that nothing which is done or wit- 
nessed there, upon any pretext whatever, shall be di- 



FEMALE SLAVES, 51 

vulged ; and the disclosure of the soul-harrowing se- 
crets of the " JVes^ro Quarter," ever endangers the 
peace and life of the sutTerer as well as the comfort 
and safety of the receiver of the doleful history. Ev- 
ery slave lives under the constant watch of the impe- 
rious drivers ; and in very few cases indeed, are they 
able to discover persons who sympathise with their 
anguish, or who are friendly to their emancipation, or 
to whom it is safe and proper to divulge their melan- 
choly tale. 

In the darkest night, and amid the " pelting of the 
pitiless storm," a well-known pliilanthropist might have 
heard some years ago — but those persons generally 
have migrated from the southern States, and the period 
of that compassion has passed away, never more to 
return — a humane citizen and a Christian might have 
heard a knocking at the door of his house. A colloquy 
substantially as follows would ensue. 
"Who is there .^" 
" It is me, master." 
"What is your name ?" 
"0, master, you know poor Caesar." 
The voice and person then being identified, the door 
was opened for his admission, and the inquiry pro- 
ceeded. 

"Well, Cresar, what do you want, out at this time 
and in such weather ?" 

"Ah, master, me want you to look at Caesar's 
back." 

The wretched son of sorrow would then throw off 
his scanty covering, and show a body peeled, flayed, 
and a mixed mass of battered flesh, morbid matter, 
congealed blood, and the usual "JVigger Plaster" of 
salt, vinegar, and other ingredients, which, if Moses 



52 CONDITION OF 

and Aaron could behold with their ancient commission 
renewed upon earth, they would set the wonder-work- 
ing rod in motion until tearfulness would surprise and 
overwhelm the hypocrites. What then ? Having thus 
been agonized with a picture of slavery which will 
stand before his eyes in broad relief during the re- 
mainder of his future pilgrimage, dare the Christian 
or the preacher who may have beheld it, to expatiate 
upon the cruelty, to charge home upon the church of- 
ficer or the church member who barbarously inflicted 
such unnatural torture, his outrageous inhumanity, 
and to publish to the world the doings of the kidnapper 
or his overseer ? Not at all. The life of a man who 
would make known the crimes to which he had thus 
unintentionally become a witness, would not be pro- 
longed one day without the counteracting interposition 
of the Omnipotent. 

The case is still more flagrant with regard to wo- 
men, whose modesty precludes them from exhibiting 
their lacerations. So far from a complaint against the 
ravisher being regarded with anything like adequate 
attention, much less with that sympathy and solicitude 
which the magnitude of the crime demands, if a narra- 
tive, however appalling, was given to the slave-driver, 
in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it would only excite 
ridicule and secure additional insult ; and in nine in- 
stances out often, if those facts were communicated to 
the wives, daughters, mothers, or sisters of slave-hold- 
ers, it would produce no other emotion than contempt 
and disgust that a "nigger wench" should have the 
iirpudence to pretend to be so modest ! In truth, 
the notorious universality of the transgressions of the 
seventh commandment, and the publicity of the circum- 



FEMALE SLAVES. 53 

stances which are connected with them, preclude every 
attempt at concealment. 

The ensuing illustrative facts will verify how fruit- 
less are all the lamentations of the suffering slaves, 
and how impossible it is to amend the infamous charac- 
ter of slavery. It is an incurable pestilence, before 
whose ravages personal purity and social decorum 
wither and die. 

A gentleman of New-York, who lately was, and 
most probably now is, an officer in one of the churches 
of that city, some time since went to the south on bus- 
iness. Among other similar and far more atrocious 
details, he narrated the following circumstances, part 
of his personal observation and experience. 

In one of the largest towns of North Carolina, when 
transacting business with one of his friends, he heard a 
heart-rending noise, and upon inquiry was informed, 
"It is only some niggers whom they are flogging in the 
public square." Every slave-driver in those places has 
the power to transfer a slave to the public jail for a 
short time, and then to direct that the scourger general, 
an officer who is regularly appointed "to preserve the 
integrity of the Union," shall "well lay on" as many 
lashes with his whip as the men-stealers may appoint, 
within the number which is limited by law. The gen- 
tleman of New-York resolved to sacrifice his feelings, 
and to take an opportunity that he might be ocularly 
convinced of the truth or falsehoods of the representa- 
tions which he had previously heard of American 
slavery. 

Having ascertained that some slaves were about to 
undergo the flaying process, he walked to the spot, one 
of the most public places in the town. There was a 



54 CONDITION OP 

sort of pillory suspended with holes for the neck and 
the wrists. The victim of lust and rage knelt on a 
block a little elevated from the ground, and when the 
head and hands were passed through the boards of the 
pillory, the whole body was left exposed for the opera- 
tions of the slave-driver and his merciless hireling, the 
flayer general. 

A man was brought out of the slave dungeon, which 
was close by ; and having been stripped of his body 
covering, his head and arms were forced into the pil- 
lory, and the kidnapper immediately ordered him a 
dozen or more lashes. The dignified town official, for 
the preservation of "the integrity of the Union," 
brandishing a fearful scourge, instantly commenced 
his patriotic labors. The whip was so long that it 
curled round the poor creature's body, and drew away 
with it the skin, peeled entirely off in a circle ; and 
before the noisy republican had counted out his tale of 
stripes, scarcely a vestige of skin could be seen. The 
flesh was cut up in deep lashes. The blood oozed out 
in every part. After which was applied the slave-doc- 
tor's panacea, salt, vinegar, and other equally molli- 
fying ingredients. 

The man having been removed and ordered off to 
the " negro quarter," next appeared a woman. For 
what reason she had been incarcerated in the prison- 
house, did not appear ; nor is it requisite that the slave- 
holder should allege any reason. His will is para- 
mount, and his mandate is law. She might have re- 
fused compliance with his lustful desires, for insubor- 
dination in that respect is the cause of nine-tenths of 
the stripes and lacerations which female slaves receive 
in the southern States from their pseudo-republican 



FEMALE SLAVES. 55 

tyrants. The shrieking creature was also uncovered 
to her loins in the public square, fastened in the pil- 
lory and a dozen lashes pronounced as her portion. The 
gentleman stated that he could not command his unut- 
terable emotions longer than to see three or four 
strokes inflicted. He walked away filled with the 
spirit of pugnacity ; wondering to himself how it was 
that the woman's breasts were preserved from being 
cut to pieces, and doubting almost whether such a 
forcible application of the slave-driver's prodigious 
whip, would not almost sever her body in two parts. 
This is an easy, summary, and at the same time a 
lawful mode to coerce women to submission. No re- 
proach attaches to it. The kindly feelings of a mother, 
wife, or daughter for a favorite slave or for their nurse, 
if such sensibilities occasionally exist, are not excited. 
It is alleged that she has been disobedient. The 
scourging is done out of sight. The tortured woman 
has no redress or sympathy, for she knows that an e.v- 
posure of the facts to either of the slave-holder's fe- 
male domestic relatives would only secure for her ad- 
ditional wrongs and aggravated torment. 

While staying in the same town, that gentleman 
boarded at the house of a widow, whose daughters 
had arrived at womanhood. He stated that youth of 
both sexes, with the natural marks of incipient virility 
constantly served abiout the house without a particle of 
covering ; and that when seated between two young 
women, these attendants would wait upon them with- 
out exciting apparently the smallest feeling, while he 
himself would be so perplexed, as scarcely to know 
where to turn his eyes, or how to express his sickly 
agitation. 



56 CONDITION OF 

In Fayetteville, where he had retired to rest at an 
early hour, one of the boys who served at the tavern, 
waked him up and inquired, " Do wish that one of the 
wenches should come to your room, sir ?" 

" What do you mean .'"' was the gentleman's retort. 

The boy replied, " I always go the round among the 
gentlemen every night to find out who wishes a girl to 
come to them." It is proper to add, that from that re- 
volting fact, the gentleman then understood how to 
elude the snares which enveloped him. 

Now that was one of the most respectable hotels in 
name, appearance, and the character of the visiters-, 
in the State of North Carolina ; and yet it is manifest 
that no house of infamous resort in any of the northern 
cities was an equally loathsome den of pollution as 
that externally splendid inn. It is still more worthy of 
notice, that the same system of iniquity could not long 
be continued, except in connection with slavery. In a 
northern post town such an establishment would not 
be tolerated for one week. A large number of supernu- 
merary women would instantly attract suspicion ; and 
before the seventh succession of travelling sojourners 
had heard the inquiry propounded similar to that which 
was offered by the boy at Fayette-ville, the public press 
would have doomed the whole concern to deathless ia- 
famy. That such is the precise situation of vast num- 
bers of the public houses in the southern States, is 
known to all persons who are acquainted with their 
habits of life and the practices of slavery. 

The same gentleman also witnessed another fact, 
the barbarous turpitude of which can only be accounted 
for by the presumption that the cause of the tortures 
was resistance to the slave-driver's demand of illicit 



FEMALE SLAVES. 57 

intercourse. A planter who resided about twenty 
miles from one of those towns in North Carolina, in- 
vited the traveller from New-York to take a ride with 
him in his curricle to his dwelling. The offer was ac- 
cepted. About the middle of the day they prepared to 
start, and the northern citizen was surprised to find a 
very young woman fast-bound by the arms behind the 
chaise. It appeared that she had been driven into the 
town after the same manner and put into the slave- 
holder's "castle of misery," as a punishment for her 
refractory conduct. In what respects she was rebel- 
lious, was not directly mentioned. The whole distance 
ot about twenty miles over the sand and dust was 
passed over in less than three hours, and the slave was 
obliged to keep pace with the horse, unless her arms 
had been separated at the elbows. Having arrived at 
the house, after a brief interval, the planter apologized 
for his absence, as he was about to take a walk and to 
attend to a little business. The traveller offered to 
accompany him, which was politely accepted. At a 
short distance, but out of sight of the family dwelling, 
the gentleman of New-York perceived the same girl, 
who had been driven almost at the full speed of a 
horse for twenty miles, suspended by the two wrists to 
the limb of a tree, with her body naked to her hips. 
With one foot she could just rest upon a small block 
of wood, while the other leg remained without any 
support. Without any ceremony, after venting a few 
of those hideous curses, with which the men-stealers 
generally salute " the flock of the slaughter," he pro- 
ceeded to flagellate her with the cart whip, within the 
legally limited number of stripes. Then leaving her 
bound to the tree, without the possibility of changing 



68 CONDITION OF 

her position, he returned to the house, conversed about 
all the common topics with no apparent perturbation, 
dined as usual, and passed away the afternoon with as 
much external composure as though no evil had ever 
entered his domicil. How long the tormented girl 
remained in her complicated misery, the traveller 
dared not attempt to ascertain. That gentlenxin, thus 
pungently instructed, kept his eyes wide awake during 
the remainder of his journey ; and he added, that he 
is convinced from all he saw and heard, that the above 
facts embody the universally habitual course of life 
among the vast nmjority of the slave-holders in the 
southern States. That inference he draws from one 
circumstance, which he almost invariably encountered 
— no secrecy was observed, and no reserve maintained 
upon the disgusting topic. In proof of which, he men- 
tioned the following fact. Ho was riding on horseback 
with two planters along a public road, when they over- 
took a young colored woman, who instantly endeavored 
to avoid the equestrians by turning away into the 
neighboring wood. One of the planters alighted from 
his horse and requested the other to hold it for him, 
remarking, "I want to speak with that wench." He 
took his whip in his hand and pursued her. The mat- 
ter was well understood by his companion, so they 
halted for him. He soon returned, and without any 
circumlocution, told whose slave the girl was, and 
what ho had done with her. To whom could she com- 
plain .' Not to her mistress ; most probably she would 
whip her for giving the intelligence. Not to her mas- 
ter, for he would have acted to his neighbor's female 
slave in exactly the same manner, as the gentle- 
man from New-York ascertained by the explanatory 



FEMALE SLAVES, 59 

conversation which ensued between the two slave- 
holders. 

There is a most unholy cardinal principle among 
slave-manufacturers which combines the effervescence 
of lewdness with the wantonness of ferocity ; thus de- 
monstrating that the perversion of the most delicate 
and tender of all our emotions when directed by divine 
grace, will degenerate into the most abhorrent impulses, 
where conscience sleeps and Satan instigates. It is 
the oracular decision of the men-stealers, that it is not 
only for their interest, but also for the benefit of the 
female slave — in fact, that it is not only expedient and 
proper, but just and indispensable, that every " colored 
girl" at an early period of life, should first admit to 
her embraces her master or his son, and the utmost 
care is taken to attain this object. They urge that it 
secures the lasting affections of the young woman, and 
especially if her first child should be the known off- 
spring of her owner. Hence, under this plea, slave- 
drivers transform their debauchery into a virtue. May 
not the decision of the Presbyterian general assembly 
respecting the baptism of colored children be imputed 
to that custom ? According to that ecclesiastical 
body's act of 1816, ministers are enjoined to baptize 
the children of female slaves upon the profession of 
their masters, (it should be fathers ;) and thus, in truth, 
the offspring of adultery and incest are directed to be 
baptized upon the Christian pretensions of fornicators, 
adulterers, and the unclean of every degree and 
name. 

One of the most dignified men in civil society in the 
county where he resided, candidly acknowledged to his 
wife some years ago, on his dying bed, that, under the 



60 CONDITION OP 

influence of that infamous principle, joined to his own 
dissohite propensities, he had first carnally known at a 
very early age, every female slave on his plantation, 
as they successively advanced to maturity, and to that 
fact might be attributed their regard for him ; so that 
they were very obedient and faithful, and he had no 
cause subsequently to exercise toward them any pecu- 
liar severity of treatment. All that outrageous iniquity 
admits of no complaint on the part of the female slave, 
and diminishes not one particle from the honor, rank, 
and influence which the profligate has attained, whilo 
the increase, as the New- York M. D. expressed it, of 
" the nalion of mulattoes a7id mongrels'' augments his 
wealth and elevates him in power and dignity. The 
lady above referred to was constantly attended by his 
colored children ; and although she was not previously 
apprized of the extent of his conjugal infidelity, yet 
the living resemblances of her husband, who were ever 
before her eyes, in the parlor and the kitchen, and in 
the negro quarter, reminded her that the character of 
a wife was merely a name ; and that it required no 
small portion of evangelical conscientious casuistry in 
such circumstances, to determine upon the undoubted 
genuineness of her own Christian attainments. 

One practical illustration of that hell-born abomina- 
tion is too affecting to be omitted. Notwithstanding 
all the care and watchfulness of the slave-driver and 
the elder women who may be his tools, either to train 
up the young female for his own sensual indulgence or 
to sell her at a higher price on account of her personal 
purity, the spontaneous afl^ections of the heart will 
elude all their craftiness, and trample upon every re- 
straint. For example ; an attachment is formed be- 



FEMALE SLAVES. 61 

tween the young woman and one of her male associ- 
ates, pure as connubial sanctity can refine and author- 
ize it, which is consummated not by a nuptial cere- 
mony, for that is abolished on slave plantations, but by 
mutual protestations of constancy and faithful affection. 
The first idea that has ever been admitted of the pos- 
sibility that the slave-holder could be disappointed, 
originates in her appearance or in symptoms which 
cannot be mistaken. She is instantly doomed to exam- 
ination, and either voluntarily, without dread or suspi- 
cion of the consequences, or through torture, betrays all 
her secrets. Then are displayed the genuine attributes 
of slavery and the true qualities of slave-holders. The 
youn;ji; woman is shut up in the appointed place, and 
when the deeds of darkness can be perpetrated without 
discovery, her lover is introduced. Before her eyes 
he is mercilessly scourged for having dared to interfere 
with the prior right, as they allege, of the slave-driver, 
or his son, or the overseer, or of some other debauchee 
to whom she may have been promised at a time spe- 
cified. Then in her delicate condition she is divested 
of her clothing, and her only friend, whose mutual af- 
fection constituted the sole cordial amid their degra- 
dation in the house of bondage, is obliged to whip her, 
and if he does not strike hard enough, and draw suffi- 
cient blood, the deficiency is measured out upon him- 
self. After their rage is glutted with this display of 
wrath, he is bound fast, and those sons of Belial com- 
plete their master's abomination by defiling her before 
her lover's face. Most probably he never again be- 
holds "the desire of his eyes." As quickly as possi- 
ble his stripes are healed, and he is then sold to the 
slave-trader, to be transported to a distant plantation. 



62 CONDITION OF 

Or if, for the sake of not " injuring the property," (he 
scourgirig is omitted, the lovers pass through some 
Other scene of torture not less agonizing and hor- 
rible. 

A gentleman who has recently travelled very exten- 
sively at the south, and who, previous to his journey, 
was decidedly incredulous respecting the terrific fea- 
tures of slavery, as they have been lately depicted be- 
fore the church and the world, mentioned the following 
circumstance among others, as having occurred under 
his own observation in one of the towns of South Car- 
olina. A merchant, with whom he was transacting 
some business, apologized for deferring it until the fol- 
lowing morning, and remarked, " I am going to attend 
a sale of a number of likely nigger ivcnclies this after- 
noon, as I want to buy one for my own use." He then 
added that they were all warranted virgins, and were 
sold expressly for concubinage and the manufacture of 
light colored slaves. The northern citizen remarked, 
" As I felt anxious to witness that scene, if it was a re- 
ality, that I might have my mind at once settled about 
slavery, I offered to accompany him to the vendue. 
Hfe was very glad to have my company, and at the spe- 
cified time we walked to the girl-market. A number 
of persons had already collected ; some of whom ap- 
peared to be busily employed in examining a row of 
decently-dressed young mulatto women, all of them of 
a light color, and from fourteen to eighteen years of 
age." The manner in which their persons were ex- 
posed, examined, handled, and especially the scrutiny 
they underwent, if possible, to ascertain whether they 
had ever been severely whipped, that friend described 
as so atrocious, when it is considered that it was done 



FEMALE SLAVES. 63 

in open daylight, and by profligates half-drunk and con- 
stantly uttering the grossest obscenities which their 
lewd imaginations could invent, that it is almost in- 
credible. " I would not have believed that such a 
scene could have been exhibited in our land of repub- 
lican freedom," he emphatically subjoined, " upon any 
evidence which could have been adduced. Even now 
it seems so utterly flagitious, that I can scarcely credit 
my own ocular testimony." At length the signal was 
given, and the young women were elevated on a table. 
The auctioneer recapitulated their history, the manner 
in which they had been reared, the soundness of their 
constitutions, their personal purity, their age, their ca- 
pacity for usefulness, and their various acquirements 
— whether any of them were sold as Christians is not 
recollected — and they were successively transferred 
to the highest bidder. The northern brother's asso- 
ciate bought the one which attracted his regard. The 
bills of sale were made out in the usual horse-jockey- 
ing slang, with the additional guarantee of maidenhood 
and other moral accomplishments. When he saw his 
correspondent the next morning, the Georgia merchant 
informed him that he had already defiled his new pur- 
chase, and that he was delighted with his female bar- 
gain. A lady now in New-York attests that she beheld 
or knew a similar scene just before her removal from 
Alabama, with one additional circumstance, that the 
young women were first weighed, and then sold, and 
that the average price was seven dollars per powid ! 

In all the old families of the slave-holders, many 
colored relatives can be found ; and in various ap- 
proximations to the color of their fathers, and with 
such a similarity of countenance that there can be no 
dispute respecting their paternity. 



64 CONDITION OF 

Slavery abolishes all the ties of consanguinity, for 
no relationship is admitted to exist between the white 
and the colored members of the same household. Un- 
der this ungodly evasion, the father will have carnal 
knowledge of a colored woman, and also with his own 
daughter by her ; and the son will defile his own sister 
and her mother ; and thus all the distinctions of do- 
mestic life are commingled in one indiscriminate as- 
semblage of unnatural monsters, who not only destroy 
the law of God and the instincts of humanity, but de- 
grade woman to the lowest abyss of pollution and in- 
iquity. 

Even that is not the worst species of the direful 
abomination. Men and even professing Christians will 
sell their own daughters for the express purposes of an 
impure life. There is now, or not long ago was a col- 
ored Baptist preacher in Georgia, who purchased his 
wife and children. One of the neighboring planters, 
a Baptist also, it is said, having understood that the 
preacher had not formally and legally emancipated his 
children, proposed to him to take his eldest daughter, 
a superior girl about sixteen years of age, to his house 
as his concubine, offering the preacher a large pecu- 
niary douceur and an annuity for life for his attractive 
daughter, with ample provision for any children whom 
she might bear. The young woman indignantly re- 
jected all his vile solicitations. She reminded her fa- 
ther of his character as a preacher, of her own pro- 
fession as a Christian, and that when she was inclined 
to live with any man, it should only be with a pious 
man of her own basely stigmatized race, in that mar- 
riage relation which God had appointed. The preacher 
assured her that in the present situation of affairs in 



FEMALE SLAVES. 65 

the United States respecting colored people, the Lord 
overlooked the ceremonial part of the institution of 
matrimony, and whatever the planter might do, if she 
honorably kept faithful to him she would have no sin 
upon her. Her conscience and her sensibilities re- 
pelled that "all deceivableness of unrighteousness ;" 
and therefore, as the only mode of consummating the 
outrageous scheme, a fictitious bill of sale was made 
by the Baptist preacher to his brother Baptist, of his 
own daughter, who was a member, it was said, of his 
own church, as a slave for the nominal sum of six 
hundred dollars. The young woman was then forced 
from her father's house to live in prostitution, because 
the laws of Georgia precluded her escape, rendered 
all complaint ineffectual, and doomed her without re- 
sistance to debasement and despair. 

In one of the largest towns of that same State, 
Georgia, there were lately, and as far as is known, 
there are now residing two or more women, sisters or 
near relatives, members in full cor^munion with one of 
the churches in that place. Some years since, as it is 
understood, they commenced business by opening a 
boarding-house, with one or two female slaves. They 
speedily perceived that by conniving at the sexual in- 
tercourse between their boarders and the colored wo- 
men, they should rapidly acquire wealth. Accordingly, 
inducements were held out to their female slaves to 
become mothers. The male children were exchanged 
for "likely nigger tvenches," and thus the breeding 
stock rapidly increased. When they deemed it advis- 
able, they would invite selected strangers, white men, 
transient persons in the city, to take tea and lodge 
in their house. The rest of the matter was managed 



66 CONDITION OF 

by their well-tutored slaves, and thus they have gone 
on, literally ''giving boys for harlots," and saying, 
"Blessed be the Lord, for 1 am rich," until their 
house is a prolific slave-factory. 

To comprehend the woful condition of woman under 
the operation of that execrable system of legislative 
enactments which exist in the southern Status, let us 
examine it in another exhil)ition. Not far from the 
residence of a Virginia planter stood the house of his 
overseer, at the end of which was joined a log cabin 
that was occupied for spinning and weaving coarse 
cloth for the slaves. On one occasion, the overseer's 
wife, who was far above the condition and rank in so- 
ciety which her husband filled, saw the slave-holder 
leave that apartment; and si)eedily after, one of the 
colored women also walked away from it, apparently in 
deep distress. With instinctive womanly tenderness 
and sympathy, she kindly inquired the cause of her 
disquietude ; but it was a very difficult task to obtain 
from her any explanation. Finally, however, the 
agonized creature informed the overseer's wife that 
the slave-holder would enter the place, and if more 
than one of the female slaves was present, drive the 
others away, detain her whom he pleased, and then 
defile her, either because she knew it was useless to 
resist, or whip his victim until she could no longer bear 
the stripes. That afternoon, when he knew no person 
could witness the scene, he had scourged her in a 
shocking manner, of which she shewed the self-evident 
proofs. 

The overseer's wife resolved to ascertain the truth 
of that statement, as she doubted the worst part of the 
narrative, although the laceration was evident both to 



FEMALE SLAVES. 67 

the touch and sight. She therefore contrived an aper- 
ture through the mortar between the logs which formed 
the partition, so that she might see without discovery 
what passed in the workshop. Her curiosity was soon 
gratified, and from repeatedly witnessing similar scenes, 
she became not only convinced of the truth of the col- 
ored woman's narrative, but she also felt that it was 
her duty to acquaint the slave-holder's wife with the 
circumstances, expressly that she might be on her 
guard against the morbid effects which might result 
from her husband's habitual licentiousness. That dis- 
honored woman, that she might secure herself from 
disease, sacrificed her feelings, and often witnessed 
her husband scourging and abusing his female slaves. 
What could be done ? There was neither redress nor 
escape. One murmur of complaint, even the intimation 
only that his lawless doings were known except by his 
intimidated victims, would most probably have been 
the cause not only of murder among the colored wo- 
men, but also of the overseer's wife's death, and the 
irreparable disgrace and agony of his wife, and prob- 
ably the ruin of his daughters, then fast verging into 
maturity. 

One more fact only in elucidation of this iniquity 
shall now be adduced. A widow lady, upon whom had 
devolved a large number of slaves, but who had no 
power over them, as they were bequeathed in reversion 
to her daughters, transferred to a minister of the gos- 
pel, a girl about thirteen years of age as a domestic 
servant, conditioned that the slave should be kindly 
used and subject to be claimed if the aged lady should 
be called from this world. That girl was taught to 
read, and in every respect was treated as one of the 



68 CONDITION OF 

preacher's own family. After she had continued with 
the minister about four years, a free young colored 
man in the vicinity imbibed an attachment for her, 
which soon became mutual. 

The minister was sorely perplexed. He well knew 
that the girl was looked upon as in a place of secure 
preservation for one of the executors of the estate, 
when the old lady should die. It was also impossible 
to marry the young man and woman ; and to permit 
them to come together in his house was a virtual sanc- 
tion of uncleanness. The female slave finally commu- 
nicated to the preacher's wife her desire that her lover 
might be permitted to be with her, that she would be 
faithful to him, and that she thought he would be the 
same to her. An evening was therefore appointed for 
him to be at the preacher's house. A candid and fa- 
miliar exposition was made of their mutual obligations. 
A solemn promise of attachment and fidelity, as far as 
divine providence should enable them to fulfil their 
vow, was exacted. A prayer was offered for the bless- 
ing of God upon them, and he was allowed to visit the 
house when he pleased. Four or five months after the 
commencement of their connubial intercourse, the 
preacher was called from home in usual duty. Upon 
his return to his dwelling he found that two kidnappers 
had been sent by one of the executors of the estate to 
take the young woman away. They had remained one 
or two days prowling about the neighborhood,^ until 
they saw the minister depart, manifestly to be absent 
for some hours. Almost immediately one of them ap- 
peared at the house, and as soon as he beheld the 
slave, and noticed that she was pregnant, his wrath 
knew no bounds, and his filthy language defied all re- 



FEMALE SLAVES. 69 

petition. A frightened defenceless woman with her 
young terrified children, could make no resistance 
where there was no person within call. The colored 
female was bound to the brute on his horse, and taken 
away as quickly as she could tie up her bundle and ai 
fast as the horse could move. When the preacher re- 
turned in the evening, he found his household in the 
greatest trepidation. Speedily after, the yourig man 
entered, and was with difficulty pacified so as not to go 
in pursuit and attempt the rescue of his wife. He fol- 
lowed her to the plantation to which she had been car- 
ried ; but as soon as it was known who he was and his 
object in visiting there, he was directed to decamp 
with all speed, or he should either be put to death 
or be seized as a runaway, and be sold to the southern 
broker in human blood. It is believed he never saw 
her after she "was stolen away from the" minister's 
residence. 

Tears, pleadings, anguish, and the law of God are 
all arrayed in vain against the insatiate horse-leech- 
like lusts of licentious slave-holders. Nevertheless, 
that is the hell-born system of all ungodliness, the 
prolongation of which is demanded, the gradual sloth- 
like overthow of which is del'ended by republicans and 
moralists, which it is blasphemously said, the example 
of patriarchs, the law of Moses, and the revelation of 
prophets oracularly sanction ; and against which it is 
impiously contended neither the Lord Jesus Christ 
nor his inspired apostles uttered their rebuke and con- 
demnation. While D. J).'s boldly and scandalously 
affirm that the dreadful condition of American colored 
women is according to "Bible doctrine ;" and per- 
jured legislators swear that it is essential "to preserve 
the integrity of the Union." 



CHAPTER IV. 



EFFECTS OF SLAVERY UPO.V DOMESTIC RELATIONSHIP. 

" O, come to my home! there my servants shall all 
Depart at thy hiddinj, and come at thy call — 
Tliey shall heed thee as mistress with trembling and awe, 
And each wish of thy heart shall be felt as a law," 

" Go back, haughty southron ! thy treasures of gold 
Are dim with the blood of the hearls thou hast sold : 
Thy home may be lovely, but round it I hear 
The crack of the whip and the footsteps of fear. 

" Full low at thy bidding thy negroes may kneel, 

With the iron of bondage on spirit and heel ; 

Yet know that the Yankee girl sooner would be 

In fetters with tiiem, than in freedom with tAee ! " ffliittier. 

The illustrations which already have been adduced 
testify beyond doubt that vice is inseparable from the 
colored woman, and that the exceptions of moral pur- 
ity must be extremely rare. For the slave-holder 
makes no difference on account of the profession of 
religion, or rather that appendage to his female slaves' 
character would render her a preferable victim for his 
sensuality, because he would have less dread for the 
consequences of his criminal intercourse. The defile- 
ment which even the female members of the churches 
experience, no person knows. To the preacher she 
cannot confide her sorrows. The white members of 
the church would only unite to punish her. To the 



EFFECTS OF SLAVERY, &C. 71 

church tribunal, whatever it may be, she cannot ap- 
peal. No one can hear her groans but he that search- 
eth the heart. No one can ascertain her genuine 
character but the Judge of all. To herself, as far as 
she may be instructed, her religion must be an inex- 
plicable mystery. Well may she ask — how can my 
life of coerced pollution consist with the command, 
" follow after holiness, without which no man shall see 
the Lord." 

It has become a proverbial axiom, even in ordinary 
social life, that women who have been drawn into li- 
centiousness by wicked men, if they retain their vi- 
cious habits, almost invariably display their revenge for 
their own debasement, by ensnaring others into the 
same corruption and moral ruin. All persons who are 
accurately acquainted with slavery as it exists in our 
southern States, know that the position is true, both 
in reference to the colored women and the white youth 
around them. It is a startling fulfilment of the doc- 
trine of retribution, " As thou hast done, it shall be 
done unto thee ; thy reward shall return upon thine 
own head." The prolongation of the system of slavery 
in no other relation is so much to be deprecated. If 
slave-holding women ever reflected, they would live in 
one constant shuddering tremor when they survey their 
own connivance at a system which has transformed 
several successive generations of colored women into 
victims of lust under their own eyes, and which abom- 
inations, in all their multiform variety, for the sake of 
luxury and sloth, they have wantonly approved. 

Many women among the slave-holders doubtless be- 
wail their lot. But their relative dependence and the 
execrable civil laws preclude them from interposing 



72 EFFECTS OF SLAVERY 

their shield for the protection of their sex. Neverthe- 
less, the large majority act and live as if they were 
convinced that colored women were merely formed to 
toil for them; and to secure their voluptuous indolence, 
they tolerate their subserviency to the base desires of 
their male associates. The female relatives of the 
slave-holders cannot be ignorant of that pernicious in- 
tercourse which exists between the colored women and 
her white nurselings, or of those gross familiarities 
which constantly pass between the white and colored 
youth of both sexes. It is contrary to common-sense to 
suppose that the father and mother can believe that the 
multifarious lewdness which is constantly perpetrated 
on the plantation is a secret to their sons and daugh- 
ters. They may not be willing to introduce the de- 
moralizing subject, or they may avoid all scrutiny into 
it, but they cannot fancy that their children beyond a 
certain age are either innocent or pure. 

That corruption of morals commences at a very early 
period of life among the legitimate offspring of slave- 
holders, and by no ingenuity can that effect be ob- 
structed as long as slavery exists. The children are 
probably suckled by any of the colored women who 
happen at the period to be in the state of lactation. 
Those youth have boys or girls who are their own 
property, as they are knavishly denominated. Through 
them, as they gradually grow, they have intercourse 
with the colored people, and from them they under- 
stand all that is said and done in the negro quarter. 
Colored boys and girls are often especially tutored to 
relate things to the other youth that they may easily 
imbibe the vilest ideas, no doubt as an incentive to vi- 
cious indulgence as they advance towards maturity ; 



UPON DOMESTIC RELATIONSHIP. 73 

while the colored women exult in the prospect that 
their boys might dishonor their tyrant's children as he 
injured and debased them. 

That fact was minutely exemplified some years ajro 
in the case of a junior female, whom her father's slave, 
with her own ascertained inclination, gradually en- 
snared into habitual lewdness with her colored boy. 
By the artful woman, that young lady was instructed in 
all iniquity, and yet she contrived her plans so craftily 
with the aid of the colored woman, that neither her fa- 
ther nor mother ever suspected the illicit practices 
which were constantly going on in their own house. 
No person dared to hint it to those parents, altliough 
some of their friends knew of her course of life as well as 
if they actually had witnessed the criminal intercourse. 
Such circumstances are the mildest form in which the 
sins of the fathers and mothers are visited upon their 
children. What would it be if the colored men were 
to retort upon the white women actual violence .'' What 
may be the awful consequences, if ever the colored 
men by physical force should attain the mastery .-* If 
no other argument could be adduced in favor of imme- 
diate and universal emancipation, that single fact is 
sufficient. Delay only increases the danger of the 
white women and augments the spirit of determined 
malignity and revenge in the colored men. By the 
abolition of slavery alone can the outrageous libidinous- 
ness of the white men and the atrocious violations of 
the colored women be abated and the good will and 
forgetfulness of past wrongs in the colored people be 
fully secured. 

Many evils which slavery brings upon women origi- 
nate in the incurable indolence with which it infects 



74 EFFECTS OF SLAVERY 

them. The constitutional weakness and physical de- 
rangennents of vast numbers of the southern slave-hold- 
ing women are derived from this cause alone. From 
their earliest youth, by example, and by precept, and 
by habit, they arc taught that labor is disgraceful, and 
that healthful exercise is only adapted Vo slavrs. 
Hence, everything which looks like toilsome employ- 
ment or regular occupation, whether in regard to the 
preparation of food or clothing, is deemed degrad- 
ing ; and except some frivolous attainment merely for 
exterior show, the young white women of the south 
are ordinarily as disqualified for the duties of wives 
and mothers when they arrive at maturity, as wlien 
they were helpless babes. Everything is left to the 
chief kitchen woman in the culinary department, and 
to the principal housemaid is transferred all the do- 
mestic arrangements. The slave-holder's wife merely 
walks around and sees everything disposed according 
to her taste or whims. 

Another consequence of slavery among the white 
women, is the comparative seclusion in which they 
live, A northern citizen, when he visits the slave- 
holder's domain, is at once struck with the harem-like 
aspect of the large mansion in which he is sojourning. 
At breakfast, probably only one of the ladies appears, 
merely as an ornamental appendage to the table. He 
may roam about for hours or sit still and read until 
change of pursuit is requisite ; and unless by previous 
arrangement, purely for their self-gratification, the fe- 
male portion of the household are almost as invisible 
as though he was immured in a monk's cell. At din- 
ner he meets the circle dressed in all the frippery in 
which a vain head attempts to adorn a frivolous person. 



UPON DOMESTIC RELATIONSHIP. 75 

From that period nearly until the appeaiiincc of tea 
and coffee, the women disappear, and it is only proba- 
bly in the evening that the unsocial distance of the 
day is exchanged for the unreserved lamiliarity of twi- 
light. This course is injurious in its tendency both to 
health and morals. Young women, who are well edu- 
cated and animated with the decorum and morals nat- 
ural to their sex, can mingle with men similarly im- 
bued with honorable and pure sentiments ; and with no 
others ought they ever to associate, without fastidi- 
ousness, and without even an emotion of impropriety. 
On the contrary, the seclusion in which the southern 
females by custom are immured, bespeaks either that 
they are coerced to shut themselves up in their own 
apartments, that as much as possible the surrounding 
wickedness and ferocity may be concealed from them, 
or they voluntarily retire from the actual witnessing of 
scenes which they abhor and of which they have re- 
solved not to be personal hearers and observers. With 
regard to young women, the effect is almost identical. 
It forms in them an artificial character, and by exci- 
ting the spiiit of insatiable curiosity, renders them the 
easy prey of the colored girl, their attendant and asso- 
ciate, who ensnares the white female youth into an un- 
hallowed acquaintance wifh the surrounding iniquity 
or into an unlawful connection with her colored broth- 
er, as a fair set-off for having been scourged and vio- 
lated by the old slave-driver and his sons. 

It is in vain to attempt to hide the arcana of slavery, 
when its deleterious influence is so palpably exempli- 
fied in constant and universal practice. Let us exam- 
ine the subject in a double aspect, under which it ob- 
trudes itself upon the consideration even of the most 
superficial observer. 



76 EFFECTS OF SLAVERY 

A young man is at the head of a plantation with 
t'.venty or fiilty slaves under his control, and he is un- 
married. It may be true that he lives continently. 
But with the avowed principles of slavery, that vice 
and crime among white persons lose their immoral 
characteristics when transacted with slaves, no man 
can prove thai he lives chastely, and with seven or ten 
women at his command, all whose comfort depends 
upon his kindness and approbation, unless he is en- 
tirely divested of the ordinary instincts of humanity. 
No man or woman in their senses will believe such pre- 
tensions. That single men do live in purity in the 
northern States is incontrovertible, because they are 
encircled by numberless and often insuperable re- 
straints, and more because they can evade the tempta- 
tions to sin. But on a slave plantation, neither of those 
counteracting circumstances exist. The incitement to 
sensuality never ceases. There is no dread of exposure. 
The loss of character is a fiction. And the idea of pun- 
ishment in any form is altogether unknown. In no con- 
dition in American society, is the truth of Jehovah's 
declaration more forcefully realized than by a young 
slave-driver at the head of his plantation of colored peo- 
ple — " It is not good that the man should be alone." 
He may continue for a period wantonly to range 
among his female slaves, but he ever finds the need of 
some person to whom he can talk in his more compan- 
ionable intervals, and at whom he can look in his hours 
of lisllessness, and whom he can show off to his 
friends at his festivals as the living ornament of his 
splendid dinner-table and his sumptuous household 
decorations. He is asked, " Why do you not marry ? 
It is not only contrary to the divine appointment, but 



UPON DOMESTIC RELATIONSHIP. 77 

also to natural instincts lor young men to live unmar- 
ried ; and in your situation especially, it is contrary to 
all decorum." The first reply will probably be some- 
thing like this: "I have no inclination tor marriage ;" 
or, " I have not time to think about it ; " or, "I cannot 
find a wife." It is rejoined, "But if you have no 
overpowering desire for matrimonial life, you ouglu to 
marry if you can find a congenial disposition in a fe- 
male companion. For it is neither proper nor decent 
that a young man should dwell among so many women 
with no restraint but his own will." Then will be ef- 
fused the whole secret : " Whom am I to marry ^ 1 
have not time to go to the north for a wife, and should 
probably make a fruitless journey." To which re- 
mark may be retorted, "But cannot you discover 
among all your female acquaintances one suitable 
domestic associate as your unchanging lover and 
friend." With a commingled expression of coun- 
tenance and tone of voice depicting scorn, aversion, 
and surprise, of which no language can convey any 
adequate idea, the young slave-holder will reply, "Do 
you think that I am going to marry a young woman 
with a vitiated constitution, the remains of her attach- 
ment for her father's niggers r" To a stranger v\ho 
is profoundly unacquainted with the secrets of " soulh- 
e)-n institutions, " the startling reply is something like a 
sudden loud noise which awakens a man out of a sound 
sleep to the vivid perception of all the realities around 
him. There, in a tew words, stands disclosed the chief 
cause that multitudes of southern young men visit the 
northern States, or of their intermarrying with the 
families of merchants who move for a permanent or 
a temporary sojourn to the cities and towns in the 



78 EFFECTS OF SLAVERY 

States where slavery yet sways. However dissolute 
may have been their own lives, however voluptuous 
their own habits, and however vitiated their own mor- 
als, yet they cannot tolerate in a wife the least ten- 
dency or even acquaintance with the ungodliness which 
ihey have ceaselessly practised ; and as " evil commu- 
nications corrupt good manners, " they are convinced 
that in ordinary cases tlieir female associates cannot 
have escaped in some form the general contamination. 
It is also very probable that from their colored para- 
mours the young men may have ascertained, in con- 
nection with their own researches, that no confidence 
can be placed in the fidelity, or, at all events, in the 
constitutional energy of the young women with whom 
they associate. 

Young ladies at the north, and especially if they are 
Christians in spirit and in truth, cannot form any con- 
ception at all of the trials through which they will have 
to pass, and the self-denial which they will have to ex- 
ercise, if they re-echo at the nuptial ceremony after 
the declaration of a slave-holder, those awful words, 
" /{// death do part." 

From the experience and evidence of aged widows, 
it is undeniable that the whole life of a Christian fe- 
male who is married to a slave-holder, must be a scene 
of anxiety and trepidation. That testimony is given 
by those who are nurtured on a slave plantation. How 
much more galling must be the yoke, and how exceed- 
ingly amplified must be the doubts and disquietude of a 
sensitive, delicate, and pious woman from the land of 
the pilgrims. Slave-driving men and slave-holding 
women as they appear in Boston, or New-Haven, or 
at Saratoga and Ballston, are no more like what they 



UPON DOMESTIC RELATIONSHIP. 79 

are in Raleigh, or Charleston, or Savannah, or Augusta, 
than the idol AJoloch is like a Christian philanthropist ; 
or the ancient proverbial Corinthian vas like that amia- 
ble convert and disciple whom the apostle Paul de- 
scribes as "washed, sanctified and justified in the 
name of the Lord Jesus, and by the spirit of our God. " 
That fact is most emphatically true in reference to 
the young men and women from the South who visit 
the northern States chiefly with a view to form a mat- 
rimonial compact. Nothing is known of them but 
their family relationship ; their anticipated patrimonial 
wealth ; their exterior accomplishments ; and to use 
their own odious term, which when rightly understood 
includes all that is loathsome and vile, their chivalry ! 
It is true, they are slave-holders ; but can young men 
so polished, so decorous, so attentive, and so charming, 
be anything else than the most obliging of husbands .'' 
The bandage is effectually applied to the young woman's 
eyes, so that the horrors of the slave plantation are 
concealed, and her ears are so completely deafened, 
that the female shrieks in the negro quarter cannot 
enter. She is in a measure dependent, and the lure of 
opulence, and of additional means of doing good, with 
the persuasions of her worldly-minded relatives, induce 
her to forget or to misunderstand the apostolic injunc- 
tion — " Be not unequally yoked together with unbe- 
lievers ;" and " as the fishes that are taken in an evil 
net, and as the birds that are caught in a snare," so 
she is " snared in an evil time." In the final result it 
will appear to the pious woman of New-England, who 
is thus caught in the slave-driver's trap, although he 
added to his other attractions a profession of religion, 
that the pretensions to Christianity by a slave-holder 



80 EFFECTS OF SLAVERY 

only furnish an inexhaustible source of conscience- 
harrowing perplexity to herself, in determining the cer- 
tainty — not of his hypocritical delusions, for they will 
lamentably be manifest ; but — of her own hopeful 
" title to mansions in the skies." 

Let us suppose that the puritan bride has left her 
paternal abode, and that she travels by land from Nor- 
folk to Carolina, or from Philadelphia to the Appoma- 
tox, James, or Roanoke river. She passes the southern 
boundary of William Penn's domam, and almost in^ 
stantly the novel scenes produce a compound reverie 
tinged with Yankee notions. The smooth and safe 
turnpike is exchanged for rolling logs, and shapeless 
moving rocks, and sinking bridges. The green pas- 
tures are transformed into old fields of gullies and sand. 
The stone walls adoined with lovely hedges have van- 
ished, and in their place is a zig-zag fence of ugly 
rails. The decently dressed, manly-looking farmers, 
have been metamorphosed into ill-clothed and down- 
cast slaves ; and the place of the rosy-faced tidy fe- 
male domestic is supplied by a half-naked wretched- 
looking victim of toil and misery. Thus the daughter 
of the pilgrims travels onward, imbibing more knowl- 
edge of evil as she makes progress ; and brooding over 
her forlorn condition with intenser emotion, as she 
realizes that every minute places her at a greater dis- 
tance from all that she has ever known of good. 

At length, she arrives at the plantation, and is in- 
stalled legal mistress of the domain. What can she 
do ? She has bartered independence, peace, prospects 
of uselulness, a tender conscience, and hope ; that, in 
law and by custom, she may be the most favored slave 
of the planter's " gang.^' She is soon admitted to the 



UPON DOMESTIC RELATIONSHIP. 81 

knowledge of the manner in which slavery manages 
its prisoners ; and then unless she " puts away a good 
conscience, and then concerning faith makes ship- 
wreck," she speedily realizes that for independence 
she has procured bondage ; for the peace of God un- 
ceasing perturbation ; for opportunities of doing good, 
the necessity of sanctioning evil ; for " a conscience 
void of offence," a constant internal strife ; and for 
the " good hope through grace," a sleepless alarm, 
lest, after all her mental religious exercises and her 
sweet experience of the constraining love of Christ, 
she " should be a castaway," with her profligate des- 
pot. It is of no importance what crimes she may sus- 
pect, and what wickedness she may know, and what 
terrors she may dread, and what good she may wish to 
perform ; — she pungently realizes not only that she is 
powerless, but that she has no earthly friend and com- 
forter. Her situation was accurately delineated by 
David when he was in the cave ; Psalm 142 : 4 — "I 
looked on my right hand, and beheld, but no man would 
know me. Refuge failed me. No man cared for my 
soul." Her husband, who ought to be her helper, is the 
cause of her most distressful agonies ; and she either 
in desperation plunges into the whirlpool of infatuation 
and inordinate indulgence with him, or she passes her 
life in a state of virtual alienation from her natural 
prop ; or more probably by a premature death, becomes 
a species of martyr to the fascinations with which 
slave-drivers decoy their victims into their ruinous en- 
snarements. 

Inspect the contrast ! Young women at the south 
at all hazards will secure, if possible, a young man from 
the north as their husband. It would be almost irrele- 



82 EFFECTS OF SLAVERY 

vant to cite as illustration, junior traders, vvlio, iiav- 
ing their all embodied in a horse and wagon, with its 
merchantable commodities, start upon their trafficking 
expeditions, with only one object in view, the acquisi- 
tion of money, and who are not very scrupulous either 
respecting the means of attaining it, or the nature of 
the article in which it is found. Those men count mat- 
rimony like any other speculation, and having calcu- 
lated the probable advantages, take the prize offered 
to them, or refuse it as not worth the supposed sacri- 
fice. All those persons are excluded from this survey, 
because their " trade, and swap, and bargain " are 
arranged and completed with all the usual contin- 
gencies attached unto it. Consequently they took it 
"for belter and fur tvorsc ! " 

But this discussion refers to young men of a supe- 
rior condition. Northern collegians who proceed to 
the slave-holding States as ministers of the gospel, or 
tutors of youth, and clerks from a merchant's counting- 
house, either as agents to transact business, or to open 
a mercantile concern in connection with their northern 
friends. Now it is certain, that young unmarried men 
sustaining those characters may reside seven years in 
the slave-holding cities and amid slave-drivers, and if 
they had no fanatical curiosity, they would remain in 
all probability as profoundly unacquainted with the pe- 
rennial evils of slavery as though no such system ex- 
isted ; and would be far less likely to become actually 
acquainted with the blood constantly offered to Moloch, 
and the virtue daily immolated to Venus, than if they 
resided at " //te notch." The slave-drivers and their 
overseers would not rouse them from their peaceful 
slumbers. Their wives and daughters cannot loosen 



UPON I>031ESTIC RELATIONSHIP. 83 

the bandage from their eyes, by information which 
would prompt them to the research after the reality. 
The colored men, having witnessed no sympathy for 
their woes, judge of them as in the same class with 
their despotic torturers. And the female slaves, never 
having felt that the strangers turned their eyes with 
compassionate emotion tov/ards them, would not dare 
to plac-e confidence in them ; and thus, amid anguish 
and lewdness, and cruelty and desolation, they would 
live as ignorant of passing scenes, as if they were 
soaring in a balloon. 

This is the solution of the difficulty which often arises 
in the minds of northern citizens respecting the true 
character and doings of slavery. Men of reputation 
and close inspectors of the social condition of persons 
around them, represent the life of slave-holders, with 
comparatively iew exceptions, as the most revolting 
state of society which can possibly be conceived ; and 
especially in its appalling anomaly when viewed in con- 
nection with our republican bills of rights and other in- 
stitutions. Other men, apparently voracious and esti- 
mable, affirm that they have resided year after year in 
the midst of slavery, and yet they never saw or heard 
of the facts which had been detailed. 

Some short time ago, a gentleman of Richmond, who 
said that he had rosided in Virginia many years, and 
also in that city for a considerable time, declared that 
he had never witnessed an auction of human beings — 
that he had never seen the cage for the temporary in- 
carceration of the slaves and free colore<l people — 
that he had never been present at the scourging of 
men or women ; and had not even distinctly heard 
upon credible evidence of the perpetration of that cru- 



84 EFFECTS OF SLAVERY 

elty — and that the stories which are so often repeated 
concerning the barbarous and impure usage of the 
slaves, he did not believe. He had never heard, he 
said, or seen those things ; and as it was impossible, 
he thought, that such occurrences could have happened 
without his knowledge, therefore the account of tliem 
as given by the " anti-slavery fanatics," he pronounced 
was a gross imposition upon the public. Now nothing 
can be more absurd than this mode of obliterating sun- 
shine realities. A man who walks up or down the 
principal street in Richmond has only to stare about, 
and the red flags with the dreadfully ominous words on 
them — " JVegroi-.s for sale — JVcgro Jludion — Jludion 
fo7' JVcgroes," will meet his eyes several times ; but 
the preacher alluded to above, had no eyes for any- 
thing, the knowledge of which might perplex his judg- 
ment or disturb his complacency with the rich slave- 
holders, who are "clothed in purple and fine linen, 
and who fare sumptuously every day ;" or which could 
induce him to look with compassion upon the people 
who have fallen among thieves ! Does his passing by 
on the other side prove that American citizens are not 
sold at auction .' 

He never saw the cage in which human beings are 
exposed to public view in a far more pitiable and re- 
volting aspect than cattle in their fold or hogs in their 
pen. But does his pertinacious refusal to behold that 
most melancholy specimen of human debasement, con- 
vince us that there is in Richmond no such cage. 

Because a slave-driver never admitted him to wit- 
ness the infliction of excruciating tortures, and the 
brutal defilement of his female slave, does his absence 
from the scene disprove the marks of the lacerations 



UPON DOMESTIC RELATIONSHIP. 85 

and erase the infallible superscription of the slave- 
holding father from the countenance of the mnhitto 
child ? 

Some years ago, a young collegian from Massachu- 
setts proceeded to Georgia, partly for his health, and 
to enjoy during the winter the benefits of that climate. 
He was speedily induced to assume the office of tutor 
in a private family, and there without any prying dispo- 
sition he soon ascertained the horrific character of the 
system, which his letters to his friends amply detailed. 
After some time, he undesignedly procured intelligence 
from one of the female slaves, of the extreme sufler- 
ings to which she had been doomed. The fact that the 
woman had communicated the heart-rending circum- 
stances to the teacher, by some unknown means was 
discovered. She received the usual slave-driver's pun- 
ishment, for daring to unfold her anguish ; and the 
Yankee soon ascertained that it was indispensable for 
him to decamp to some other plantation. Notwithstand- 
ing all the insight which he had obtained into the abom- 
inations of slavery, he subsequently married an heire.-s 
of slaves, and his correspondence with the ''fanatics '' 
was instantly discontinued. 

Not long since, two orphan sisters were sent by their 
guardian from the south to a northern seminary to be 
instructed in all the arts and sciences and accomplish- 
ments of a very distinguished female seminary. Dur- 
ing their sojourn in that place, the eldest young woman 
attracted the regard of a Christian, and the ofler of 
marriage which he made was accepted. She was re- 
moved from the school to her native abode, and thither 
the gentleman followed her with the full expectation of 
consummating the nuptial covenant. But soon at'ter 



86 EFFECTS OF SLAVERY 

his arrival at the place where she resided, insuperable 
obstacles appeared to their union. She could not or 
would not become his wife, unless he would reside at 
the south, and take the usual control of a large estate 
with its slaves. He would not consent to marry her, 
unless she would accompany him to the norlli, and re- 
move her slaves that they might be emancipated ; and 
thus they separated. 

That the young women at the south will entangle the 
yo)ing men of the north into marriage, is a general fact ; 
and the sole cause is found in their intimate acquaint- 
ance with the inordinate profligacy which slave-holding 
necessarily includes. A healthful man from the north- 
ern States, with proper credentials, a good exterior, 
decorous manners, and in the character of a minister, 
or of an instructor of the higher grade, appears in a 
district where his services are needed. His residence 
is designated with one of the nabobs. As soon as his 
principles and qualities are fully ascertained, and all 
that is needful of his personal history has artfully been 
obtained from him, if no prior arrangement exists, the 
plan is formed to enchain him in the fetters of hymen. 
Everything which could surprise his " Yankee notions'^ 
is kept out of sight ; for his strict puritanic principles 
will be an additional recommendation, as proving that 
he is not hackneyed in vice. Of slavery he never 
talks. It is never adverted to in the most distant man- 
ner ; and is as much excluded from all conversation, 
as if it had never existed. He sees no colored persons 
but the immediate household attendants, a well behaved 
coachman and footman, with two or four youth ap- 
proaching to manhood, comfortably dressed and appa- 
rently contented. In due season, he is married. Of 



UPON DOMESTIC RELATIONSHIP. 87 

all the anterior circmnstances in the life of his bride, he 
is profoundly ignorant. He only knew her as a coy, 
reserved girl, who finally permitted herself to be courted 
into marriage. Of the negro quarter, and its wretch- 
edness, debasement and crimes, not a syllable had ever 
been repeated, and he finds at the end of the honey- 
moon that he has married a wife, and that to her is al- 
lied a mass of inexplicable contradictions and moral 
unaccountables. The apparent exterior is the same, 
but the animating spirit is entirely metamorphosed. 
He has no alternative but to flee away, or to fulfil the 
common proverb, being " with the Romans, to do as 
the Romans do." To return to New-England is im- 
possible. The slave-driver would not permit his daugh- 
ter to go there to " work like a Nigger ;" and if she 
was there, she would not only be useless, but also his 
unceasing torment and burden. He therefore resolves 
to make his necessity a virtue ; and thus he tacitly ad- 
mits their principles, adopts their habits, and gradually 
becomes a slave-driver and a slave-dealer. 

From his wife he has probably learned the secrets of 
the plantation, and has also discovered that he has mar- 
ried a puny, debilitated and almost helpless creature, 
all whose beautiful color before marriage was paint, 
and all whose sprightliness was artificial. Her body is 
as feeble as her mind is enervated ; and from others 
he may comprehend that her virtuous predilections are 
not much stronger — as verified before his acquaintance 
with her — than her physical energies. He is thus driven 
from his last solace ; or if he is not thus informed, his 
life is embittered, and his usefulness at an end. He 
therefore becomes a slave-driver. Casting off his pu- 
ritanism, he justifies man-stealing, and having procured 



83 EFFECTS OF SLAVERY 

a D. D. {it the end of his name, he devotes his time 
jind his theological lore to prove that man-stealing is 
honesty, that the system which authorises the commis- 
si' n of " all uncleanness with greediness " is " bible 
doctrine that will stand," and that the manufacturing 
of slaves is essential to " preserve the integrity of the 
union." 

'J'he women after marriage speedily undergo a strange 
metamorphosis. They become tame and spiritless, and 
of little more domestic utility than household statues ; 
or they subniit to be chief mistress manager to super- 
intend, direct and provide for the rest of the harem and 
its appendages ; or if they are healthy and strong, 
they exemplify the irascibility and turbulence of the 
genuine slave-driver. Then, wo be to their " JWitg-cr 
venchcs,^' for they stand between two fires. The lordly 
despot scourges them for not submitting to his ungodly 
desires, and the termagant mistress lacerates them for 
receiving her husband's adulterous embraces ; and 
thus between the male demon incarnate, and the living 
daughter of the furies, the slaves are sliut up in what 
may truly be termed a "little hell upon earth." 

The above representations of sluve-drivers and their 
" soulhcrn inslilutions "are not designed to be applied 
to [lersons who reside in the cities and commercial 
towns, where the slave-holder has kidnapped only as 
many men and women as may be deemed necessary 
for the menial services of the family. The publicity 
of their circumstances, the observation to which they 
are exposed, the greater facility of discovery, and the 
tear of that loss of reputation which might injure their 
mercantile business, obviously repress the more viru- 
lent developments of the inherent ferocity and ungod- 



UPON DOMESTIC REL ATIOXSHIP. 89 

liness of slavery. Similar causes render it necessary, 
for the sake of appearances, that the domestic slaves 
should be better fed, more decently clothed, and in 
general more kindly treated ; otherwise a man's credit 
might be injured, and his interests and rank and value 
in society be depreciated. 

Notwithstanding all those obstacles, the insecurity 
and debasement of the female slaves are equally visi- 
ble and certain, when the condition of woman is scru- 
tinized even in the residence of a citizen merchant, 
with its exterior disguise, as when it is beheld in the 
negro quarter of a slave plantation, in its naked de- 
formity. That case was well propounded lately by a 
minister of the gospel in Philadelphia, who was born, 
educated, and long resided among the slave-drivers, 
A conversation had passed respecting the veracity of 
Mr. Thome, in reference to his vivid description of the 
heinous transgressions of the seventh commandment, 
which, as he publicly announced at the first meeting of 
the American Anti-Slavery Society, were so incessant 
wherever slavery predominates. The charge of false- 
hood which was reiterated against him, was also intro- 
duced, and the relative value of the testimony of two 
eye-witnesses, whose statements are separated wide as 
positive assertion and flat denial can differ, was dis- 
cussed. That minister finally remarked, " It is equal 
folly and wickedness to deny what cannot be concealed, 
which no man considers disgraceful, and which is so 
common, that no person scarcely ever for one moment 
seriously reflects upon the obvious anomaly. Go into 
the house of a preacher, or lay officer, or church mem- 
ber of any denomination. You perceive one or two 
men, and three or more women attached to the house- 



90 EFFECTS OF SLAVERY 

liold. They are all dark colored with the African cast 
of countenance. You look upon the colored children 
who are playing about or are suckling infants, and they 
are of different shades of approximation to white, and 
their features are marked with different evidences of 
conformity to the European face. You do not inquire 
who are their fathers, but the fact is self-evident that 
they are not the offspring of the black men and women 
before your eyes. Therefore Mr. Thome's statements 
are undeniable, except by persons who are ignorant of 
the state of things where slavery exists, or who wilfully 
attemjjt to blind the eyes of northern Christians to the 
dreadful corruption of the southern churches and the 
unceasing wickedness of that atrocious system and its 
ungodly adherents." That preacher left us to draw 
what inferences we chose from his emphatic and orac- 
ular testimony. 

In every aspect in which the subject can be exam- 
ined, slavery destroys the moral purity of the youth of 
both sexes. Constantly to behold the naked bodies of 
the colored boys and girls must be most pernicious. 
The practice of having an attendant to perform all 
*hose offices about the person from which intuitive del- 
icacy and modesty would shrink in disgust if they had 
not been partially extinguished by the force of custom 
and the plea of indolence, from the earliest period of 
recollection — that custom casts a suspicion over the in- 
nocence and virtue of the youth which nothing can re- 
move. The comparative seclusion in which the young 
women live enclosed within the boundaries of the ex- 
tensive plantation, with no companion scarcely, except 
the boys and girls who wait upon them, and who, 
from their association with the kitchen and the negro 



UPON DOMESTIC RELATIONSHIP. 91 

quarter, become the chief caterers of events with which 
to fill the morbid vacuity of minds too weak to treasure 
up useful knowledge and too listless to think, and whose 
imaginations are constantly impelled to the polluting 
scenes which tjieir colored attendants describe in all 
their repulsive grossness ; that seclusion alone must be 
pestilential to all that is good. But when it is contem- 
plated in connection with their ordinary unsocial habits 
of life, with the facilities through the medium of the 
favorite colored confidante to elude any discovery of 
their movements, and the general indifference upon that 
most affecting subject which prevails among the slave- 
driving licentious fathers on account of their own ir- 
regularities and devotedness to amusement and dissi- 
pation, so far from its being a matter of astonishment 
that the young men on the slave plantations should be 
profligates, and that young women should be suspected 
even if not actually corrupt, it is obvious that nothing 
but a miracle of mercy and a constantly copious effu- 
sion of divine grace could preserve them from the in- 
fection of the leprosy which at all times encircles 
them. 

The spirit and principles of Christianity in ordinary 
cases are far less potent in their practical influence at 
the south, than in the non-slave-holding States. Slavery 
has invented a geographical religion, so that a scanty 
measure of revealed truth, especially if it swayed the 
heart, conscience and life of its professor at the south, 
would be branded as singularity or denounced as fa- 
natical hypocrisy. Therefore the most salutary and 
effectual restraints upon wicked principles and vitiating 
habits and practices are virtually extinguished. 

The application of this proposition to slavery renders 



92 EFFECTS OF SLAVERY 

the previous portraitures not only more convincing as 
to their accuracy, but more fearful in their prospects. 
As the otherwise admitted standard of morals which 
predominates among the white people in their social 
intercourse is not supposed to exist, or at least to have 
any authority among the colored citizens in their rela- 
tion either to the whites or to each other, it necessarily 
follows, that the judgment of reason, the dictates of 
conscience, the laws of reciprocal equity, and the 
claims of instinctive co:iipassion and benevolence, al- 
though ratified by the plainest declarations of " the 
oracles of God," are nullified, except in those case& 
where, from some especial and peculiar cause, the ini- 
quities of slavery are not embodied in their natural 
operation. Besides, the "southern institutions " which 
we are told " wj7/ sfand," because they are in con- 
formity to "Bible doctrine,^' and which being, as their 
Sir Oracle announced, "the corner stone and cement 
of society and of our republic," and as their dough- 
faced, Judas-like coadjutors aver, being essential to 
.^'.preserve the integrity of the Union," those " south- 
ern institutions " are never introduced as themes of 
investigation and discussion. They comprise a "mys- 
tery of iniquity" in its most awful characteristics, for it 
is a compound of man-stealing, lewdness, and cruelty, 
in their most nefarious varieties and abominations ; 
but neither the moral law of Jehovah nor the doctrines 
of Christ are ever applied to it. There is the balance 
of the sanctuary, but slavery is never weighed in it ; 
and instead, they have substituted the scales in which 
to sell almost naked young mulatto women by the 
pound. There is " the house of prayer," so called, 
but they have literally "made it a den of thieves." 



U.ON DOMESTIC RELATIONSHIP. 93 

There is a preacher, but he is a man-thief and an un- 
pitying shepherd, who neither feeds nor feels for "the 
flock of the slaughter." There are the Christian 
possessors who " slay them, and who hold themselves 
not guilty." And there is the human cattle nianufac- 
turer — 

"A savage ruder than the slave, 

Cruel aa death, insatiate as the grave. 

A Christian hroker in the trade of blood! 

A reptile baser than the slave, 
1-oatlisome as death, corrupted as the grave. 
Whose children spring alike from sloth and vice. 
Are born Itt.-: xliices^ and loved at markeL priic. 
Thus he buys and sells — steals and kills for gold!" 

and then snys, " Blessed be the Lord, for I am rich." 
The Christian lyrist, Montgomery, had he resided 
during seventy years upon a slave-driver's plantation, 
where 

Darkness, anguish, despair, and death, 
In profound aud lasiing silence reign, 

could not more graphically have depicted the immoral 
features and the unholy course of ihe countless major- 
ity of that prison-house of sorrow. 

One additional evil of slavery, and among the worst 
of the whole troop of abominations which may be called 
Gad, is the nrtiiicial and deceitful character which 
everything assumes, and in which slave-holding fam- 
ilies, to a stranger, generally appear. It is an amalga- 
mation of polished suavity and furious haughtiness, of 
splendid prodigality and squalid penury, of sumptuous 
food and costly raiment with half starvation and en- 
tire nakedness, of pretensions to the most scrupulous 
refinement with ferocity and licentiousness, and some- 
times an exterior respect for the forms of Christian 
devotion, while all its obligations are incessantly disre- 



94 EFFECTS OF SLAVERY, &C, 

garded. That visor is not worn merely by the men 
and women who have learned the art and who practice 
the mutual conventional grimace, until none of the 
adepts are imposed upon by the flimsy disguise ; but it 
is understood and adopted by the youth of both sexes, 
so that all confidence and pure attachment are banished 
forever, and the ^'southern institutions/' with that " bi- 
ble doctrine" upon which they stand, and that man- 
stealing, woman-defiling, and soul-murdering system 
which republican patriarchs declare is " the corner- 
stone of freedom " that sustains "the integrity of the 
Union," those charming "southern institutions" can 
be perpetuated only by that hypocritical craftiness 
which ensnares a northern young woman unwittingly to 
become the chief manager and governess of the slave- 
holder's harem, and by those deceitful blandishments 
through which northern young men " void of under- 
standing " in reference to slavery, are decoyed into 
the station of matrimonial overseers to drive the slaves, 
and to maintain the voluptuous indolence and extrava- 
gant decorations of a haughty wife and an imperious 
mistress. Thus in one sense unintentionally exempli- 
fying Solomon's vision, " With her much fair speech 
she caused him to yield ; with the flattering of her lips 
she forced him. He gocth to her straightway, as an 
ox goeth to the slaughter or as a fool to the correction 
of the stocks, till a dart strike through his liver, as a 
bird hasteth to the snare, and knoweth not that it is for 
his life." 



CHAPTER V. 



DOTY OF THE SLAVE-HOLDER S FEMALE RELATIVES. 

It is not designed to convey the idea that the south- 
ern women who are allied to slave-holders directly 
justify, or even formally extenuate the unholy practices 
which appertain to slavery. But their apparent igno- 
rance must be assumed, and their silence upon the 
topic is no better than wilful murder of their own com- 
forts. This brief discussion, therefore, will unfold their 
duty, that they may arouse themselves and resolutely 
strive to stop the course of that ungodliness which in- 
undates the slave-holding States ere the plagues of 
Egypt are again exhibited in this republic. 

1. The inordinate dissoluteness of slave-drivers in 
general must be thoroughly understood by their female 
relatives. They may strive to evade the knowledge of 
it, or from an idea that an avowed acquaintance with it 
and an attempt to correct it would be unavailing, they 
may resolve to act as if they believed that the " negro 
quarter" was the scene of Eden-like innocence ; yet 
they cannot be exculpated from the charge of tacitly 
conniving at the heinous evils which encircl« them. 
The grand inquiry then, is this, " How long ought that 
slavery to be tolerated which necessarily produces 
such inveterate horrors ?" 

Of all the stupendous impositions with which the 



96 DUTY OF 

slave-deulers and their northern confederates have en" 
deavored to deceive our country, nothin;f is more incred- 
ible than the hypocritical outcry respecting amalgama- 
tion. The genuine African race is fast disappea:ing 
from the United States ; and citizens with every shade 
of color, are multiplying with disproportionate celerity. 
When the slave-holders talk of prejudice against the 
descendants of the kidnapped Africans, they only mean 
that they dislike free men and women. They have no 
disgust for the female slave who suckles their children 
or who brings forth light-colored offspring to be nur- 
tured as merchantable cattle. All their objections are 
made against the free man whom they cannot scourge 
with impunity, and against the free woman whom they 
cannot force into submission to their ungovernable 
lusts. Among white men at the south, amalgamation 
with colored women is the rule ; and abstinence 
from illicit intercourse with them, is the exception. 
That hideous system is the unavoidable result of 
slavery, while universal and instantaneous emancipa- 
tion at once would place all colored women, young and 
old, under the care and guardianship of their natural 
and affectionate protectors, and the present system of 
amalgamation, which is rapidly white-washing the skin 
and transforming the features of the slaves, would 
cease. Except in the cities and large towns, and it is 
only adopted among the most debased portions of both 
races, unlawful intercourse between the whites and 
free colored persons is almost unknown. The aboli- 
tion of slavery would destroy the prejudice against 
persons merely on account of their exterior conforma- 
tion, and ewtirpate, as soon as the Jubilee trump of 
freedom resounded, at least nine-tenths of the licentious 



SLAVE-HOLDER S FEMALE RELATIVES, 97 

practices and of the amalgamating atrocities which 
now defile and curse the slave-holder's domain. 

2. Probably no vice has so direct and immediate ten- 
dency to blind the mind to all correct moral perceptions 
and to harden the heart against all spiritual and refined 
sensibilities, and to stupify the conscience into a rejec- 
tion of all religious impressions, as the sins of unclean- 
ness. It does not require an actual personal partici- 
pation in that ungodliness to render a person callous 
in conscience, at enmity with God, and " carnally- 
minded, which is death." To the operation of that prin- 
ciple, it is probably owing, that the slave-holding wo- 
men in general exhibit so profound an unconcern re- 
specting the transgressions of the seventh command- 
ment. May it not be imputed to two exhibitions which 
are constantly before their eyes from their earliest re- 
collections .'' 

Youth must constantly perceive their own likeness 
in the junior slaves around them. That exhibition can 
neither improve their minds nor purify their morals. 
Why is that evil tolerated ^ It promotes luxurious in- 
dulgencf and augments wealth ; for these family rela- 
tives will always obtain a good price. At no very dis- 
tant period by-gone, a merchant of Baltimore became 
the father of a colored girl, by one of his slaves. 
The child was brought up with his other sons and 
daughters, and received the best instruction which 
could be obtained. She repaid his care by her supe- 
rior qualifications and her filial obedience and attach- 
ment. When near death, he added a codicil to his 
will enjoining upon his son, as principal executor, to 
emancipate her instantly, and bequeathed to her a 



98 DUTY OF 

comfortable annuity for life, to preserve her from de- 
pendence and all the solicitations to vice. Immedi- 
ately after her father's death, her brother ravished her. 
As soon as she found herself pregnant, the brute, 
through the agency of one of the men-traders, sold 
her to a merchant in New-Orleans at a very high price, 
expressly that she might become his concubine. The 
widow and sisters were so lost to all feminine sensibil- 
ity, that little or no solicitude was felt for her fate. 
Nothing but slavery could have developed such unnat- 
ural turpitude. 

Youth continuously behold colored persons of all 
ages around them, either almost or totally naked. Not 
merely children of different ages in the "negro quar- 
ter," who play and tumble about without covering, like 
sucking pigs in their piggery, but also men and women 
work about the house or in the fields, without any cov- 
ering. A "/rtenrf, " who was travelling some short 
time since, stopped at a tavern for breakfast near the 
city of Washington. When his attendance was de- 
sired, he found in the room a tawdrily dressed girl, 
ready to serve him at the table, and presently there 
entered a man to wait upon him, without even a shred 
of clothing. His feelings were so disgusted with the 
sight of a inan thus degraded to the level of a brute, 
and with the apparent in.sensibility of the young wo- 
man, that he was choked ; and after having with great 
difficulty swallowed one or two mouthfuls of food, he 
arose and pursued his journey. That such displays 
must unavoidably be most pernicious to the delicacy 
and moral purity, not only of young women, but also 
of boys and men, it would be superfluous to attempt 
to prove. 



Slave-holder's female relatives. 99 

A vitiated imagination with all its impure workings, 
or to use the apostle Paul's impressive language, a 
" mind and conscience defiled," must be the inevitable 
consequence of that constant development of adul- 
terous intercourse, and of that beast-like display of 
the human frame — for women are not less exposed to 
the sight than men. What high criminality must at- 
tach to those who transform human beings into brutes ? 

The infinite Creator and Judge has denounced with 
the menace of condign punishment, not only the grosser 
infringements upon the laws of chastity, but even the 
interchange of garments by men and women, because 
it affords an opportunity for secret crime. Thus all 
masquerades are condemned as an outrage upon mo- 
rality and decorum ; for in assumed disguise licentious 
men and women who are "past feeling, may give 
themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all un- 
cleanness with greediness." It is therefore manifest 
that the customs of a slave plantation are destructive 
of personal purity and social order, and that the sys- 
tem can produce "only evil continually." Hence, 
however they may " profess that they know God, yet 
in works they deny him, being abominable and disobe- 
dient, and unto every good work reprobate." So that, 
like the Cretans (Titus i. 12, 13) they "are alway 
liars, evil beasts, slow bellies, who must be rebuked 
sharply, that they may become sound in the faith." 

3. The present and the prospective condition of 
slave-holding women is most perilous, and their dangers 
are augmenting in constant progression. Among the 
melancholy evidences of a sin-hardened and a con- 
science-seared people, none is more pungent than the 
delusion in which they live, that they njay " forsake 



100 DUTY OF 

the Lord, provoke the Holy One of Israel to anger, 
and go away backward," without condemnation. 

The holy scriptures contain one most memorable and 
edifying example which may well be applied " for in- 
struction in righteousness" to the slave-driving women. 
By the instigation and counsel of the false prophet, 
]!!alaam, the daughters of Midian enticed the Israelites 
to sin, which was as public and as shameless as it is 
among the slave-holders ; for Zimri took into his tent 
a woman in the sight of Moses and all the congre- 
gation, who were humbling themselves before God 
for the plague which was then destroying the people, 
as the punishment of that same iniquity. Almost im- 
mediately after, the judgment of God came upon 
them, and every woman who had " known man by 
lying with him," was condemned to death, because 
they had " beguiled the children of Israel and vexed 
them with their wiles." 

Among the most terrific scenes which the desolations 
of war, with the storming and pillage of cities and 
towns comprise, the most direful are the barbarities 
which are perpetrated upon the women. The hus- 
band, and father, and brother instinctively shudders at 
the idea of his wife, or daughter, or mother, or sister, 
being abandoned to the furious lusts of those " beasts 
of prey, military ruffians." During the war with 
Great Britain in 1813, the whole continent resounded 
with outcries against that small detachment of British 
troops who landed at Hampton, in Virginia, and who 
added to their chicken-stealing and similar trophies of 
war, the violation of the few women who could not es- 
cape from the grasp of those brutal marauders. That 
atrocious crime has covered Cockburn and his gang 



slave-holder's female relatives, 101 

with deathless infamy. Bat what was that single and 
very restricted outrage, when contrasted with the in- 
cessant and far more nefarious rapes which are perpe- 
trated on the slave-plantations near that same village ? 

No woman, however abandoned, is so lost to natural 
instinct, as not to feel injured at the idea of force being 
used upon her person. Even the ordinary female se- 
ducers and panderers for debauchees will not directly 
aid in the rape of a female in their power. What then 
ought to be the deep and unspeakable penitence of the 
southern women, who are privy to all the violations 
which pass around them, and to the almost overpower- 
ing enticements with which the young colored women 
are always encircled, that they may never admit the 
embraces except of men lighter coloredthan themselves. 
Almost every mulatto child which is born upon a slave 
plantation is a visible proof of the illicit intercourse 
which has taken place between the white slave-drivers 
and their colored female vassals. May not the slave- 
holding women therefore dread the result of that pro- 
tracted system, when the whites become too few and 
powerless to resist the energy and resolution of a large 
preponderating force, rasolved to be free, or to perish 
in the attempt to gain their liberty and rights .' 

That danger now is not only imminent, but it daily 
becomes more fearful in anticipation. The colored 
people, especially the mulattoes, are rapidly multiply- 
ing. All the better members in society, as to morals, 
health, and the various qualities which constitute the 
heart of a nation, are migrating from the slave-holding 
States to the north-western districts ; and it requires not 
the spirit of prophecy to foresee, that ere long slavery 
must be abolished in those States by the voluntary con- 



102 DtiTt OP 

sent of the domestic tyrants, or the Lord will send 
another Moses and Aaron — and then again will be 
displayed 

"That womler-wcirking arm which broke 
From Israel's neck the Egyptian yuke ;" 

and southern women may be assured that they will have 
no adequate defenders from the north. Magicians, 
with their enchantments, may delude them ; but their 
procrastination will only expedite the period when fe- 
male Christians at the north will re-echo the joyous 
chant of emancipated women at the south : 

" How vain was tlieir boasting, the Lord hath but spoken ; 
Then sing, for the pride of the tyrant is broken — 
Sound tlio loud timbrel o'er all the wide sea, 
Jehovah has triumph'd, his people are free!" 

4, What then are the duties of the slave-holding 
women at the south ? In general they may thus be 
enumerated. To disseminate the truth upon the sub- 
ject of slavery ; to protest d<;cidedly against the exist- 
ing evils ; to combine their efforts, that they may more 
efficiently resist the continued predominance of the 
hideous iniquity which surrounds them. And above 
all, if they are Christian professors, in a body to with- 
draw from the churches to which they respectively be- 
long, as the only public testimony that they can give 
of their obedience to the apostolic mandate, (I Corinth- 
ians, vi. 9 — 11) "not to keep company with forni- 
cators." 

It might be extremely difficult, under existing cir- 
cumstances, to comply with the former rules ; but the 
last could be accomplished — and in fact, is the most im- 
portant of the whole ; or rather, without that, all the 



slave-holder'^s female relatives. 103 

rest will be ineffectual. We alledge no personal irreg- 
ularities against the female Christian professors whether 
married or single, except in those instances of a delu- 
sive profession, which, alas ! universally occur. That 
women who are church-members are cruel and most 
terrific scourgers, no well-informed person will dare to 
deny ; and that they tacitly sanction the violation of the 
seventh commandment, by their silence and association 
with the profligates around them, is equally true. 

Ministers of the gospel may not actually commit 
adultery with their " JYigger wenches," but it is certain 
that they perpetrate more flagrant crimes. On Lord's 
day afternoon, June 4, Mr. Gardner, a Presbyterian 
colored preacher of Philadelphia publicly declared in 
his discourse, that in Virginia some time ago, a minis- 
ter of the gospel sold a girl for one thousand dollars, 
knowing that she was purchased expressly for unclean- 
ness. To render his conduct more indescribably fla- 
gitious, " he refused to take nine hundred and fifty 
dollars, which had been offered to him by a person who 
wished to save her from that doom." If this be not 
the actual fulfillment of the declaration in Psalm 50, 
then there is no mode of correctly interpreting and 
suitably applying language : " When thou sawest a 
thief, then thou consentedst with him, and art a parta- 
ker with adulterers." That preacher was never ar- 
raigned, tried and censured, for selling out of his own 
family, possibly his own daughter, a young woman with 
no other design than, that the purchasing kidnapper 
should defile her body and ruin her soul. 

One of the grand sources of licentiousness consists 
in the virtual approbation which refined and chaste wo- 
m^en give to debauchees, by associating with them. 



104 DUTY OF 

What then can be thought of that woman's sense of 
decorum and of her Christian principles, who holds 
nominal Christian communion with the man that sells 
the girl whom he has kidnapped intentionally to be 
forced into a life of iniquity ? Now admitting that 
every preacher has not either himself corrupted a 
young woman, or sold her to another with that base 
design, yet if he be a slave-holder, or if he be not an 
advocate for the immediate abolition of slavery, he up- 
holds the system, and therefore is equally guilty, upon 
the principle that " the receiver is as bad as the thief." 
Women imbued with the grace of God who belong 
to churches in which the ministers, lay officers and 
members are slave-holders, do thereby practically avow, 
that they consider " pure religion and undefiled " as 
sanctioning the most abhorrent impurity ; and that per- 
sons who sell and buy young women for the sole pur- 
pose of polluting them, and manufacturing light-colored 
offspring for the human flesh market, are Christians ! 
Well might Mr. Gardner affirm in his sermon already 
quoted — "It is folly and v>ickedness to pretend 
TO PRAY to God to send down his Holy Spirit on 

SUCH A CHURCH !" 

Women, in their present fettered and forlorn condi- 
tion, may not be able to diffuse anti-slavery papers and 
pamphlets. They may not be able effectually to decry 
the present abominations of slavery. To combine 
their efforts against the odious corruptions which en- 
circle them, may not be easily practicable. But the 
grand witness of their detestation of slavery, and of 
their own personal purity would be given emphatically 
and irresistibly, if the genuine Christians at once 
would cease to hold any fellowship with the adherents 



slave-holder's female relatives. 105 

and supporters of a system, that first kidnaps girls, 
then rears them for a life of lewdness, and then sells 
them to the highest bidder, that they may be doomed 
to a life of constant pollution and hopeless bondage. 

As long as women will declare by their actions, by 
ittending the ministry, and by uniting with them at the 
Lord's table, that preaching slave-drivers who traffic 
young women for a life of prostitution, and the man- 
merchant who buys her for that object, are official ser- 
vants of the church, and faithful disciples of the Lord 
Jesus Christ, and " good and acceptable members " of 
Christian communities, so long will the poison spread, 
and all efforts to arrest that slavery which is woman's 
direst curse, and most inveterate enemy, will be alto- 
gether useless. The command of God is this : (2 
Corinthians, vi. 14 — 18) "Come out from among 
them, and be ye separate, and touch not the unclean !" 

Women who profess Christianity in the slave-hold- 
ing States have a peculiar class of duties to perform. 
Upon them devolves in the most imperative manner the 
important office of branding the correct title in the 
cheeks and foreheads of the man-stealing, girl-selling, 
pimping, and slave-manufacturing preachers. No per- 
son can force our Christian sisters to become or to 
continue members of that "synagogue of Satan," of 
which a kidnapper is preacher and men-stealers are 
lay officers, and the members are slave-drivers. Every 
woman who is enrolled as a member of a church by 
whom slave-holding is sustained, is one of the ungodly 
confederacy ; and except she is a penitent, and " brings 
forth works meet for repentance," she may anticipate 
that she will be rejected at the last day, as a consum- 
mate hypocrite, who in actual result aided to obliterate 



106 DUTY OF, &C, 

the command of God from its authority over the un- 
derstandings, and the hearts, and the consciences of 
men. 

Here then is the duty and the privilege of the Chris- 
tian women who reside among slave-holders. If they 
cannot at once emancipate their male relatives from the 
thraldom of sin, they can place before thera a luminous 
display of pure and inflexible principles. They may 
not instantly eradicate all the wide-spread contamina- 
tion with which the southern churches are filled ; but 
they will powerfully resound the trumpet in Zion ; and 
by their abstaining " from the appearance of evil, " they 
will start a prolific subject of inquiry, set a holy and 
influential example, and by their Christian consistency 
they will soon hurl slavery from its proud and usurped 
predominance. No woman is guiltless who in that case 
does not immediately " depart from the iniquity ; " and 
who does not resolve in the spirit of Joshua, " as for 
me and my house, we will serve the Lord ;" and in 
the determination of the people of Israel, who, to Josh- 
ua's solemn appeal, replied, the Lord our God will we 
serve, and his voice will we obey." 



CHAPTER VI. 



IMPURITY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES. 

"Paiil hypocrites! who turn 
Juilgmeiit aside, and rob the Holy Boole 
Uf those high words of truth, which search and burn 

In warning and rebuke. 

" How long, O Lord, how long 
Shall such a priesthood barter truth away, 
And in thy name, for robbery and wrong, 

At thino own altars pray; 

"Wo to that priesthood! wo 
To those whose hire is with the price of blood — 
Perverting, darkening, changing as they go. 

The truth and law of God." fVkittier. 

Could the fact be denied, or rather were it not 
avowed and justified, alas ! by the servants of the 
sanctuary, it would not be credited that an almost indis- 
soluble connection apparently exists between slavery, 
which is " all filthiness and superfluity of naughti- 
ness," and the disciples and churches of Him who 
was "holy, harmless, undefiled and separate from 
sinners." 

Exclusive, therefore, of all the other arguments 
which can be urged for the prompt, decisive, and en- 
tire abrogation of slavery in connection with the 
churches of Christ, the condition of woman alone is a 
resistless plea for the excision of slave-dealers from 



108 IMPURITY OF THB 

" the communion of saints." It is not less preposterous 
than it is nugatory, in reference to the church of God, to 
waste time in frivolous disputation and research respect- 
ing the value of the property which may have been pur- 
loined, or the quantum of guilt that the criminal may 
have contracted ; the whole matter is compressed in four 
monosyllables : "He is a thief." So in its application 
to slave-holders, it is altogether superfluous to inquire 
how many slaves he drives, how much or how little h-e 
scourges them, whether he leaves them to pine with 
hunger, and in nakedness, or whether he half-starves 
and partly clothes them, and whether he abuses and 
traffics them, or leaves them to wallow in uncleanness, 
and nurtures them for his own emolument. To all this 
captious deceitfulness, there is an emphatical and in- 
fallible retort : " He is a man-stealer." That is de- 
cisive until it can be demonstrated by the authority of 
the head of the church or his inspired apostles, that 
habitual robbers are Christians ; in other words, as 
the Presbyterians state, until " Sinners of the first rank 
arid f^uilly of the highest hind of theft," and as the 
Methodists subjoin, ivho never had a ^^ sincere desire to 
fiee from the tvrath to come," can be proved to be con- 
scientiously honest, and Zaccheus-like penitents, wil- 
ling to restore to the poor what they have "taken by 
false accusation." 

Look at that gross absurdity in another aspect. The 
preacher, as the case may be, has stolen two, four, 
seven, ten, or more of his brethren, free-born native 
American citizens, and in his kidnapping he perse- 
veres, seizing every child whom, by the execrable 
''southern institution," with impunity he can grasp. 
In that boasted republicanism he lives and dies, and 



CHRISTIAN CIlunCHES. 109 

intends to bequeath the human beings, if not his own 
children, yet his fellow Christians, so called, of his 
own society, to his heirs. Thus living and resolved to 
die a kidnapper ; and after he is dead, to continue a 
man-stealer. Yet no person must venture to question 
that Doctor's moral philosophy or brotherhood to Jesus 
of Nazareth, who preached "deliverance to the cap- 
tives," and who was expressly sent into the world "to 
set at liberty them who are bruised." 

To emblazon such men as Christians, and especially 
as preachers, is enough to fill Pandemonium with tri- 
umph ; but to superadd the abomination that men who 
encourage all lewdness, that their "negro quarter" 
may be enlarged and its inhabitants may be multiplied, 
shall fill all church offices and virtually govern the de- 
nominations with which they are connected, is one of 
the most astounding anomalies that exists in the history 
of the church and the world. Here, then, is the mo- 
mentous question : How can sincere Christians coa- 
lesce in fellowship with persons who either commit 
habitual sins against the seventh commandment, or who 
encourage or force others into the constant transgres- 
sion of the laws of purity and the mandate of Je- 
hovah ? 

In any other case but slavery, the proposal of such 
an inquiry would be deemed utterly revolting and im- 
pious. To admit the advocates and participants of 
slavery into the church of Christ, is just as outrageous 
as to acknowledge the evangelical attributes of per- 
sons who ket'p houses open especially for licentious- 
ness. For, let the most favorable view of the horrific 
condition of American female slaves be taken, and its 
utter irreconcilableness with all that " the oracles of 

10 



1 10 IMPURITY OF THE 

God " inculcate, whether in doctrine, or precept, or 
menace, or promise, or example, will be instantly dis- 
cerned. 

That it may not be supposed there is any design to 
represent the state of slavery as more loathsome and 
criminal and anti-Christian than the reality, we will 
admit " a marvellous work and a wonder " to be the 
existing representation of life among slave-holders, al- 
though well-informed persons in their senses will " in 
nowise believe it, though a man declare it unto " them. 
To go as far as the application of the argument can 
possibly be extended, it shall be adopted as a fact, that 
all persons of every station and character belonging 
to the churches of each denomination are personally 
chaste, and even the supposition that either of them is 
actually impure shall be excluded from all considera- 
tion, — which is a specimen of scepticism that would 
only be ridiculed in Richmond, Raleigh, Charleston, 
and Savannah. Yet the slave-drivers, in their connec- 
tion with the church, do not gain one jot in their favor, 
when their title to be Christians, and to enjoy " the 
communion of saints," is weighed in the balance of 
the sanctuary. 

They know that all diversified ungodliness is inhe- 
rent in the system of slavery, and that it cannot be 
eradicated ; for the predominance of the matrimonial 
obligation and the consequent extinction of all that pro- 
miscuous lewdness which is now so universal, would 
speedily exterminate that iniquitous system. Slavery 
is the offspring of Mammon and Venus, and about 
equally partakes of the very worst attributes both of 
the fatlier and mother, or to adopt the apostle Paul's 
words which he uses in another application, it is "a 
mystery of iniquity, and the working of Satan." 



CHRISTIAN CHURCHES. Ill 

How can such turpitude be allied to that " holiness 
without which no man can see the Lord ?" To it may 
aptly be applied the expostulation of Paul : (2 Corinthi- 
ans, vi. 14 — 18) "Be ye not unequally yoked to- 
gether with unbelievers. What fellowship hath right- 
eousness with unrighteousness ? What communion 
hath light with darkness ? W^hat concord hath Christ 
with Belial ? What part hath he that beJieveth with 
an infidel ? What agreement hath the temple of God 
with idols ^ Wherefore come out from among them, 
and be ye separate." 

All slave-holders, male and female without exception, 
either tacitly sanction or openly defend the system of 
slavery, which is only another name for rape, incest, 
polygamy and all unutterable uncleanness. To multi- 
ply human cattle, preachers, lay officers, and church 
members, of almost every name and denomination, for 
the sake of securing opulence, with its vitiating luxury, 
not only connive at the lewdness, but actually encour- 
age it. No pulpit denounces it, for it would be a death- 
blow of slavery. No evangelical discipline is enforced 
against their participation in the ungodliness, for that 
act would at once extinguish " the church !" No wo- 
men, alas ! " cry aloud and spare not ;" so that their 
matronly protest can be heard reverberating from the 
river Lawrence and the lakes to the gulf of Mexico, 
against the dooming of a million of women to defile- 
ment and ruin. Until very recently, northern Chris- 
tians, almost without exception, would permit those 
partakers with adulterers to chatter in their churches, 
about the love of God, the conversion of souls, the 
pursuit of^ holiness, and the sanctity of heavenly joy. 



112 IMPURITY OP THE 

Suppose the ministers, officers and members of five 
hundred churches should all agree together to confeder- 
ate with hordes of robbers and pimps for the double 
purpose of covering over with a Christian garb, and of 
decorating with a Christian name their horrible craft, 
that they might divide the infernal spoils with impunity ; 
how long v/ould those accomplices in villany be toler- 
ated as disciples of the immaculate Redeemer ? 

Now we maintain that a member of such a conspiracy 
would have better pretensions to church membership, 
than any slave-driver in the southern States. His do- 
main is one large den of uncleanness, expressly en- 
couraged by all possible means to augment the stock of 
merchantable human cattle, and he effects that object 
by every process which can be invented to whitewash 
the children's skin, and to render them in external ap- 
pearance of the b^uropean features and figure. If per- 
sons, whose whole life is one unceasing course of those 
abominations, can make any justifiable claim to the 
character and spirit of Christians, then there is no dis- 
tinction between that " marriage which is honorable in 
all, and the bed undefiled — and the whoremengers and 
adulterers whom God will judge." Hebrews, 13: 4, 

A preacher, for example, comes from the south. He 
is at the head of a college, a D. D. ; and he prates 
about the " soutlurn inslitutioiis.'^ Now that very term 
itself comprises a great and mischievous lie ! From the 
most corrupt motives, and lor the most ignoble objects, 
it is intentionally ^'calling things by lerong names. ^' 
Countless multitudes of northern citizens have no idea 
of what is meant by "southern institutions!" They 
suppose that it refers to their civil government, or to 
their collegiate establishments, or to their philanthropic 



CHRISTIAN CHURCHES. 113 

societies. They hear it reiterated, until the term 
*' southern institutions " has become one of the most art- 
ful contrivances in all the dictionary of imposing false- 
hoods, to blind and mislead unreflecting citizens. It is 
resounded, that the fanatics and some Christians at 
the north are resolved to overthrow " southern institu- 
tions ,•" and the thoughtless portion of the community, 
by this cheat are induced to believe that it is intended 
to dissolve the federal compact, and thus to deluge the 
republic in civil war, bloodshed and desolation. 

Let it only be known, that by " southern institutions,'^ 
kidnapping is meant, with all its inseparable cruelties 
and uncleanness, and the bandage, which the slave- 
driving falsifiers and their dough-faced hirelings have 
tied over the eyes of the people, is instantly removed ; 
and it is perceived at once, that the common oracular 
proverb is exemplified to the letter : They who steal, 
and they who commit lewdness will lie ! 

What then are " southern institutions ?" An out- 
rageous system of man-stealing, woman-defiling and 
slave-manufacturing atrocities ; the unparalleled wick- 
edness of which no tongue can describe, and no mind 
can imagine Totalk of prolonging such ''institutions,^^ 
which could have been invented only by men who had 
not " the fear of God before their eyes," and which are 
prolonged only by persons under " the instigation of the 
Devil," is not less insulting than it is abominable. But 
the most outrageous fact in the whole hell-born scheme 
is this. Those " southern institutions " are now au- 
thorised by law, and sustained by the scandalous hypo- 
crites, who call themselves " the church /" — deceivers 
who solemnly sanction the plunder of the post-office, 



114 IMPURITY OF THE 

who torture and murder Christians and ministerrJ of the 
gospel, and who withhold from the colored citizens all 
terrestrial comfort, and every right and privilege au- 
thoritatively bestowed upon them by "God the judge 
of all ;" thus fulfilling Peter's prophecy : " Through 
covetousness with feigned words, shall they make 
merchandise of you." 

'i o sustain those '^southern institutions '^ which in- 
clude every diabolical ingredient that is commingled in 
•' the golden cup full of abominations and filthiness of 
fornication," (Revelations, xvii. 4) the northern church- 
es have long aided. That general mischief has been 
done in two ways : by acknowledging those merchants 
in impurity to be " fellow-citizens with the saints and 
of the household of God," and by accepting the dona- 
tions of men-stealers to aid the holy cause of Christian 
benevolence ; which is a flagrant violation of the di- 
vine injunction, (Deuteronomy xxiii. 18) "thou shaltnot 
bring the hire of a whore into the house of the Lord 
thy God for any vow," for it is an " abomination unto 
the Lord thy God." 

A very large proportion of the wealth that is so prod- 
igally squandered by the slave-holders, is the direct re- 
sult of that unrestricted licentiousness which is so uni- 
versally practiced and encouraged. Yet much of that 
plunder has been cast into the treasury of the Lord. 
It is not less an ungodly donation, than would be the 
money obtained from the rent and profits of a regular 
brothel in any of our large cities, with the additional 
aggravations of the tortures and stripes and robbery, 
combined with the forced uncleanness. To which may 
be added the black incests, which, in ordinary criminal 
intercourse between the sexes, are unknown. Our phi- 



CHRISTIAN CHURCHES. 115 

lanthropic societies must unhesitatingly reject those 
spoils of innocence, or they will be involved in the 
curse, which, without speedy repentance and amend- 
ment, if " the signs of the times " can be discerned, 
ere long will usher in a social catastrophe, that will 
overwhelm the southern States in indiscriminate ruin, 
and the effects of which will pass over all the other 
portions of our country, like " the pestilence that walk- 
eth in darkness, and the destruction that wasteth at 
noonday." 

The other practical approbation which has been given 
to the adulterous pollutions of slavery, is the incorpo- 
ration with the church of the defenders of all that in- 
curable turpitude. It is not enough to say, that our 
northern churches do not directly number any slave- 
drivers in their communion ; the effect is the same .' 
That preacher who wantonly encourages all inordinate 
sensuality, who enforces the abrogation of the mar- 
riage covenant, and who constantly enacts the disrup- 
tion of all family consociations, is admitted to preach 
in our pulpits, and to speechifij on our platforms, and to 
pray in our devout assemblies. Is not that the strong- 
est testimony which can be presented that we do not 
deem his impious usurpations of the divine prerogative, 
and his unceasing robberies, with all the wickedness 
which is connected with his slave-manufacturing ma- 
chinery, to be inconsistent with the Christian charac- 
ter .'' Is it not declaring that it is the perfection of ' ' pure 
religion and undefiled," when we allow such mentobe 
our advocates in prayer, and our instructers in truth 
and duty .'' 

That unpitying shepherd always beholds "the flock 
of the slaughter," and feels no emotion, while he wit- 



116 IMPURITY OF THE 

nesses their murderers slay them, and "hold themselves 
not guilty." He and his accomplices know the slaugh- 
ter, and permit it to proceed with impunity. He has 
seen the kidnappers seizing every colored child whom 
they could grasp without fear, after having devoted all 
their ingenuity to amplify the methods by which through 
licentiousness they could be multiplied. He has watch- 
ed those men-stealers traffic the bodies and souls of men 
without intermission. He has heard those hypocritical 
traders, after they have sold the image of God, as im- 
pressed upon their own concubines and children, the 
offspring of adultery and incest, blasphemously resound 
— "blessed be God, for I am rich !" He himself, and 
the members of his own " synagogue of Satan," have 
copied their ungodly deeds, have sold the Lord's preach- 
ers and disciples of their own denomination, who were 
under their own pastoral care ; and while they were 
eulogizing the conscientiousness, virtues and fidelity of 
the sanctified convert, proclaimed his Christian graces 
for no other purpose than that they might receive one 
hundred dollars more for his conscience, another hun- 
dred dollars for his sobriety, another hundred dollars 
for his veracity, another hundred for his honesty, anoth- 
er hundred for his "fear of the Lord," another hundred 
for his faithfulness, and the seventh hundred dollars 
above the common price, for the commanding influence 
which he can exercise among his fellow slaves to re- 
strain them from iniquity. Notwithstanding, that preach- 
er visits the north ; instead of being banished from all 
decorous company, he becomes the confidential asso- 
ciate of our wives, and daughters, and mothers, and 
sisters, and the expounder of revealed truth to teach 
us righteousness and purity ! It would not be so inju- 



CHRISTIAN CHURCHES. 117 

r'loiis to good morals, every Lord's day morning to tranS' 
ftr the inmate from the State prison, and the pander from 
the brothel to the pulpit ; that monstrosity would be com- 
prehended at once, and the Christian brethren and sis- 
ters would walk away, and study divine truth and wor- 
ship God in tlieir own habitations. Their hearts would 
not be agonized, and their understandings befooled, 
and their consciences harrowed, by hearing a man who 
is always causing the violation of the seventh com- 
mandment prate about purity ; and a sleepless man- 
thief ca7it respecting the obligations and claims of in- 
tegrity and justice ! 

But if he be not a preacher, he comes from the 
south with his testimonial, that he is a Christian in reg- 
ular form, and claims to be received into your com- 
munion during his summer abode among the puritans. 
At the Lord's table, he is seated perhaps next to one of 
our matrons, whose whole life has revealed the instinct- 
ive delicacy of her feelings, and the refined purity of 
her heart — or he takes his place by the side of one of 
our maiden disciples, who would shrink from contam- 
ination like a sensitive plant. Well is it for them at the 
time, that their devotional employments are not dis- 
turbed by the knowledge of their companion's charac- 
ter, and their hallowed communion destroyed by loath- 
ing the nearness of the adjoining slave-driver and 
slave-dealer, who is desecrating the " communion of 
the body and blood of Christ." It would not be one 
jot more insulting and unchristian, to go to the watch- 
house on Lord's day morning, and select the vagabonds 
and strollers who had been taken out of (he street dur- 
ing the previous night, and bring them in their squal- 
idness and filth to " the Lord's supper," than to admit 



118 IMPURITY OF THE 

nien-stealers and transgressors of the seventh com- 
mandment to an evangelical name and its consequent 
immunities. 

A minister of the gospel who is now at the extreme 
south, after long laboring among the slave-hojders in 
vain, has lately written a letter to his brother, in which 
he states that " all attempts to preach th^ gospel and to 
do good there by its influence, are utterly futile.^' That 
as long as slavery exists, the prevalence of religion 
among that people is altogether impossible ; and that 
the little benefit which morality and decorum produced 
among the slave-drivers when he first visited the south, 
is gradually diminishing. Soon after his arrival among 
them, he began to express his objections to their ini- 
quitous ^'southern institutions ;" but his brother preach- 
ers and other members of the man-stealing banditti, 
very cavalierly informed him that " he must be silent ; 
and if he did not like their ways, he could go back 
to the north." The reason why the corruptions of 
slavery now are more abhorrent and less disguised 
than formerly, is this : those kidnappers and land pi- 
rates frequently discuss the topic, that they may invent 
perversions of the scripture to justify their abomina- 
tions, and because, from the operation of their mur- 
derous Lynch law, they are assured that very few, if 
any persons from the north, unless they are avowed 
partizans and accomplices in their iniquity, will have 
the opportunity to scrutinize them. In all the slave- 
holding States, preachers, lay officers, and church mem'- 
bers of all denominations are the most infuriated adva- 
cates of the various privations and barbarities which are 
enacted and enforced under the pretended authority of 
Judge Lynch, that fictitious substitute of the Neros 



CHRISTIAN CHURCHES. 119' 

and Domitians, who proclaim that man-stealing, evil 
concupiscence, uncleanness, and cruelty, which are 
the hearts' blood of the "southern institutions," are 
essential to *' preserve the iniegrily of the Unio7i." 

At present the southern churches are only one vast 
consociation of hypocrites and sinners. There is 
scarcely light enough among them to render the tangi- 
ble darkness visible to themselves, and salt enough to 
preserve them from putrefaction. But probably the 
more serious part of the direful criminality and tre- 
mendous danger which that fact involves, appertains to 
the northern churches. Either without reflection, or 
from worldly motives of advantage, they have not only 
tolerated without a murmur that dreadful delusion, that 
gangs of men-thieves are consistent members of the chxirch 
of God, but they have deliberately sanctioned that ab- 
horrent dogma by their ecclesiastical confederation 
with them. They have received as holy benevolence, 
the spoils wrung from the tears, stripes, chastity, and 
toil of the slaves. They have listened to the hypocrit- 
ical cant and applauded the chivalric "sorceries" of 
ecclesiastical men-stealers. They have received to 
their communion the slave-manufacturers, who pur- 
chase and force all lewdness, e.xpressly to multiply the 
bodies and souls of men for the human flesh-market, 
that boys may be sold according to their muscular en- 
ergy, and girls for their prostitution and breeding, and 
both at a highly increased value if they are attractive 
in person and animated by the graces of the Holy 
Spirit. The awful statement of the prophet, delivered 
nearly twenty-five hundred years ago, is a most graph- 
ical exhibition of the slave plantation ; and although 
it may not be minutely applicable to the "negro quar- 



120 IMPURITY or THE CHRISTIAN CHURCHES. 

ter" of preachers and Christians, so far as they are 
personally considered ; yet they are chargeable with 
the traitorous guilt of deliberately approving and at- 
tempting to justify, by the perversion of the scriptures, 
all the ungodliness which the picture drawn by the 
prophet of tears includes. (Jeremiah v. 7 — 9 ; and 
xiii. 27,) "When I had fed them to the full, then they 
committed adultery, and assembled themselves by 
troops in the harlots' houses. They were as fed horses 
in the morning. Every one neighed after his neigh- 
bor's wife. I have seen thine adulteries, and thy 
neighings, the lewdness of thy whoredom, and thine 
abominations on the hills in the fields. Shall I not 
visit for these things ? saith the Lord. Shall not my 
soul be avenged on such a nation as this ? Wo unto 
thee, O Jerusalem ! wiU thou not be made clean ?" 

Christians of New-England ! there is the truth of 
God. It is for you to make the application of it, and 
prove that you mix faith with the gospel that you hear, 
by bringing "forth fruits meet for repentance," that 
they who do those deeds "may be taken away from 
among you," until they " repent of the uncleanness 
and fornication and lasciviousness which they have 
committed." May the Lord grant you grace to be 
faithful for the Redeemer's sake ! Amen. 



CHAPTER Vll. 



DUTY OF NORTHERN CHRISTIAN WOMEN. 

O woman ! from Ihy happy hearth 

Extend thy gentle hand, to save 

The poor and perishing of earth — 

The chained, polluted slave ! 
O! plead for all the sufferers of thy kind — 
For the crush 'd body, and the darkened nrnnd! JfhUticr. 

Christian sisters ! " what shall we say to these 
things?" "A wonderful and horrible thing is com- 
mitted in the land. The prophets prophecy falsely ; 
and the priests bear rule by their means, and the peo- 
ple love to have it so. What will ye do in the end 
thereof?" 

It is in vain that the slave-drivers attempt to show 
that women have no concern with slavery — that nor- 
thern women ought to fix their ^Mention upon their 
domestic duties, and " let slavery alone" — and that 
Christian women ought to shut their eyes, and exclude 
from their hearts ail attention to their debased sex, as 
they are seen, where lust incarnate walks about in 
open daylight without a blush, and woman's grand 
shield, matrimony, is basely discarded. The very fact 
that slave-holders use every artifice, insult, scorn, and 
ridicule, to hinder Christian women in the northern 
States from interposing on behalf of their colored sis- 



l'i!2 DUTY OF NORTHERN CHRISTIAN WOMEN. 

ters held in degrading servitude, is self-evident proof 
of the truth of the position, that they not only dread 
the influence of the "mothers in Israel," but that to 
women peculiarly belongs the high duty of testifying 
against the atrocities, and of endeavoring to abolish 
the system of slavery. In two ways can they most ef- 
fectually promote the object. 

1. Christian women must loudly denounce that code 
of laws and that unholy practice which nullifies the 
matrimonial covenant. Upon that topic, it is emphati- 
cally the duty of women to speak ; and especially of 
those who profess to believe that "without holiness, 
no man shall see the Lord." With the {"ew exceptions 
which may have occurred, the argument has no con- 
cern ; but it is a self-evident truth, that for men ordi- 
narily to remain unmarried, and yet pretend to chas- 
tity, is an insulting imposture. 

It is also indubitable, that uncleanness and the illicit 
cornecfion bftween the sexes, is proportioned to the 
number of men who live in celibacy. Hence, licen- 
tiousness must inevitably predominate in such a state 
of society as that which prevails where slavery pre- 
dominates ; especially when sensual indulgence is the 
prolific source of worldly aggrandizement and we:ilth. 
We therefore maintain that Christian women are in 
their own appropriate sphere, when they " lift up their 
voices on hiuh, and cry aloud " against that sleepless 
abomination, which not only debases the immediate 
victim ol" the lewd voluptuary, but also imbues his 
mind with disrespect for female character and viitue, 
and brands him as the most guilty traitor to his race ; 
because he actually subverts the appointment of God, 
and destroys that hallowed relation and that domestic 



DUTY OF NORTHERN CHRISTIAN WOMEN. 123 

society which are the chief blessings that have sur- 
vived the fall. 

Can it be expected that men without purity and con- 
science, all whose lives from chiidiiood have been in- 
ured to the grossest and most indecent familiarities 
with ^'JVigger icenches,'" as they brutally denomi- 
nate the young colored girls ; that such men should 
rightly feel their criminality, or that they will aban- 
don their profligate course, as long as northern 
Christian women associate with them ; and more, — 
as long as northern Christian women intermarry with 
them ; and acknowledge slave-drivers as brethren of 
" the household of faith >" 

2. Christian women must resolutely discard all com- 
munion with slave-holders as members of the church 
of God. It is altogether insulting to common-sense, 
to pretend to talk of a slave-dealing Christian. That 
soul-destroying infatuation, through the mercy of Je- 
hovah, is beginning to pass away. Multitudes of per- 
sons now reject the astounding deceitfulness, that a 
hardened " stealer of men" can be a follower of Je- 
sus, who came to " preach deliverance to the captive ;" 
yet they have not exemplified their own principles, be- 
cause "it is inexpedient." They are afraid to go too 
far at once, lest, to use a very silly phrase, "there 
should be a reaction." A reaction in doing good ! 
What strong delusion ! " 

What have Christian women to do with expedi- 
ency, when the question is concerning the deliver- 
ance from contamination of a million of their sex ? 
What have Christian women to do with expediency, 
when the object to be attained is the rescue of half a 
million of adult females from promiscuous concubin- 



124 DUTY OF NORTHERN CHRISTIAN WOMEN. 

age ? What have Christian women to do with expedi- 
ency, when it depends upon them whether the sacred 
wall of the nuptial obligations shall constitute a barrier 
lor all the colored people in the United States against 
the lawless incursions of slave-manufacturing debau- 
chees ? What have Christian women to do with expe- 
diency, when Jesus, the lord of all, commands them 
not " to keep company with a fornicator, though he is 
called a brother, atid not to partake with adulterers ?" 

How can Christian women say that they are not ap- 
prised of the exact characters of slaveholders, and 
therefore know not whether they should not violate the 
law of charity by refusing to hold communion with 
them ? They need not investigate all the private life 
of slave-drivers. They are not required to- ascertain 
how many colored children in their slave-quarters have 
their "image and superscription." Such a scrutiny 
would not become a northern matron. All that inquiry 
is rendered useless by one indisputable reality, which 
extends from the Potomac to Florida, and from the first 
morn to the last evening of the year. Slave-holders for- 
cibly have exterminated marriage ; and they have placed 
colored women in such a defenceless condition, that 
they have no safeguard against wanton lust, and every 
possible inducement to be depraved and impure. 

It is altogether a deception to talk of men as Chris- 
tians, who invent, [>rolong, palliate, or connive at a 
svs-tem which extirpates the institution of marriage as 
established by God in the garden of Eden. That crim- 
inality every slave-driver constantly perpetiates ; be- 
cause he knows that American slavery and the matri- 
monial ordinance cannot co-exist. The latter, there- 
fore, is banished, that the former may be predominant. 



DUTY OF NORTHERN CHRISTIAN WOMEN. 125 

It only remains, therefore, for Christian women 
promptly and decisively to build the partition-wall that 
shall sever them from the advocates and practitioners 
of that iniquitous system which is a direct prohibition 
of female chastity, and which debases their sex to the 
vilest and remediless degradation. 

The only effectual mode by which that separation 
can be effected, is through the church. Christian 
women must be heard protesting against all fellowship 
with the nullifiers of the connubial relation. Christian 
women must be seen withdrawing from the houses of 
prayer when a slave-driver enters the pulpit, or in any 
way attempts to lead the devotions, or oflfers himself as 
an acceptable communicant at the Lord's supper. 

How can a Christian woman quietly hear a man 
preach who at once would cut short all that she holds 
precious in this life, her domestic tenderness and en- 
dearments, were the Lord pleased to change the color 
of the skin which she and her family display ? How 
can a Christian woman patiently listen to a preacher 
who proclaims that her Christian sisters shall be dives- 
ted of all protection for her purity, and shall be abused 
as no better than beasts that perish, with impunity, 
merely because her ancestors were kidnapped from Af- 
rica by the descendants of felons transported from Eu- 
rope ? How can a Christian woman take her seat at 
the communion-table by the side of a man whose plan- 
tation is a large prison, where fraud, lewdness, and 
cruelty ever reign ? They must no longer give sanc- 
tion to that wickedness, by encouraging " stealers of 
men " to deceive themselves with the infatuated notion 
that they can make any pretensions to decorum, much 
less to the Christian religion. 



126 DUTY OF NORTHERN CHRISTIAN WOMEN. 

Endeavor to place yourselves in the exact condition 
of the colored women " who are drawn unto death, and 
ready to be slain." Fancy yourselves every moment 
liable to be polluted — and, if you refuse submission, 
to be lacerated, and then forced by your tyrant to com- 
ply. Remember that, as a mother, you would be ex- 
posed to separation, without a moment's warning, from 
your children, and as a lover, to be sent to an impas»- 
sable distance from him who possessed all your affec- 
tion. Recollect that the heart-rending anguish of that 
severance would be the punishment of a resistance to 
voluntary defilement combining all the most heinous 
transgressions of the seventh commandment. Add to 
all that melancholy picture the circumstance, that your 
compound wretchedness is thus certified without re- 
dress, and until the termination of your mortal exist- 
ence. 

It is superfluous to inquire, whether the southern 
slave-driver who sits by your side at the Lord's table, 
himself has actually perpetrated all that abhorrent in- 
iquity. It is absurd to ask whether he is the complete 
personification of that adulterous ravisher and woman- 
scourger and woman-seller. He sustains the system 
by his ungodly perversion of the Bible. He upholds 
the wickedness by being confederated with the slave- 
traders, and all their unutterable atrocities. He resists 
all the measures and all the philanthropists who would 
abolish that infernal system of crime and misery and 
desolation. 

Christian women, therefore, must resolve not to hold 
the communion of the gospel with slave-drivers, and 
not to hear slave-holders preach. They must con- 
stantly insist upon the enforcement of that discipline in 



DUTY OF NORTHERN CHRISTIAN WOMEN. 127 

the churches with which they are united, that shall ex- 
clude all the accomplices of the slave-holders from 
having any admission to their fellowship. Be not de- 
ceived, Christian sisters ! Every woman belonging to 
a church that recognizes the profession of religion by a 
slave-holder, virtually approves and clothes in the garb 
of godliness the debasement and pollution of her sex, 
the erasure of marriage, and the extinction of domes- 
tic relationship, affection and enjoyment. Therefore 
she is an accessory to all the rapes and lewdness which 
fill the slave-driver's domains with infamy and despair. 

p. s. A friend, who read the preceding pages after 
they were printed, wrote on the title-page — '' JVo au- 
thentication of facts.'' Who will deny them ? To per- 
sons who understand anything of human nature in its 
unrestrained overflowing of corruption — and to per- 
sons who are acquainted with "things as they are" in 
the slave quarters; an "authentication" of the de- 
tails, in this illustration of slavery " in its efl"ects 
upon woman and domestic society," is just as neces- 
sary as it is to prove the self-evident truths of the 
Declaration of Independence, and the existence of 
sunshine on the fourth of July ! When that evidence 
is demanded, so that its introduction shall be necessary 
to aid the cause of freedom, and to decapitate that 
monster. Slavery, — the witnesses shall be instantly 
summoned. 



